Here are some short activities I wrote for British Council Video Zone last year. They were quite fun to write, quick too. No full lessons, just springboards I guess. I hope you find something useful. Plenty more video-based resources on the site too.
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Just a quick idea for a bit of video game chat. We did a 5-week module on the topic, this was my context builder. Took about an hour as the teens got into it.
Step 0: Lead-in questions if you want, like…
Alternatively, maybe do a picture dictation of a video game image below to get students talking, then elicit lesson topic.
Step 1: Hand out loads of screen shots of video games or put them around the room. I chose these eight:
Students look at images and discuss:
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Here’s a video-based intro for the topic of light and shadow (YLs). You may have seen this activity type on ELT Planning before:
This is just the starter activity (feel free to adapt). It can be a springboard to further discussion, inquiry, etc.
Hope it’s useful 🙂
Feature image: Mocomi video screenshot
This was a context builder for a sequence of lessons on viral videos, viral ad campaigns, viral marketing, etc. It’s similar to the idea I shared for introducing recipes. Anyway, used this with B1+ teens, worked well.
Task 1
Find loads of links to (good) viral videos. Our focus was on viral marketing, so I chose lots of ads. Create a QR code for each vid and add these onto a handout in a table like this one:
I gave students this instruction: (more…)
It’s the penultimate week of term. State schools are on holiday, so the students have already requested something ‘fun’ and ‘light’ for lessons this week. The current topic is food. It’s lacked a creative task so far, and I don’t want to go over old ground (designing a themed restaurant, menus, crazy recipes, and so on). It’s time (I think) for the Bake Off…
Note: this lesson does not involve baking! (more…)
I was asked on my FB page where I find good videos for class. I stumble upon them now and then (like here, thanks Lana), but I also find these sources pretty useful. Hope this helps! (more…)
Here’s a simple idea for introducing recipes. Put these QR codes up around the room:
I do love a good video-based lesson. Jamie Keddie at lessonstream does them really well. Kieran Donaghy’s lessons on Film English are good for focusing on certain themes. Vocabulary in Chunks and AllatC are two great blogs sharing video lesson ideas – the latter isn’t updated much now though. There are lot more video related content around (like the ISL Collective video quizzes or the listening tasks on TubeQuizard), but there’s always room for more.
Fluentize (formerly known as Veslio) offers ‘modern English language lesson plans based on real-world videos for teachers with teenage or adult students’. Nik Peachey recently endorsed it on his LinkedIn feed so I blagged a promo code off the creators to check it out. (more…)
I feel like I say this a lot, but thanks to ELT-cation (Svetlana) for yet another great lesson idea. Your post on Wordless Videos for ELT was awesome.
I used the Western Spaghetti video from PES as inspiration for a crazy recipe task…
The basis of the task was for students to…
1) choose a dish they know well, write down the ingredients
2) think of a theme (sports, school, music, etc)
3) relate each ingredient to the theme – so for a school theme bread might be an exercise book, pepper might be chopped up pencil lead, etc
4) Write the recipe and illustrate
5) post-it note vote on the best/strangest recipe
Svetlana’s post came along at the perfect time for our module on cooking. It was a great end of term task for the students. They produced some really creative work that on the whole was pretty accurate and included plenty of target language for cooking processes. Thanks for planning my weekend lessons Svetlana! I guess that was a gift from one British Council to another!
In Developing Materials for Language Teaching (2013) Tomlinson introduces a text-driven approach to materials development. He goes into quite a bit of detail regarding text selection, offers a suggested framework for the approach and provides a practical example (pages 99-114). I won’t attempt to summarise, I’ll just say read the chapter! It was the most useful and applicable reading I undertook on my recent MA course.
For the purpose of this post, here’s the framework overview, taken from Tomlinson (2013:110, ©Bloomsbury)
click on the picture to enlarge
We had to plan a lesson using the text-driven approach for a unit assignment. I chose to use my favourite poem as the text – Blessing by Imtiaz Dharker. Here’s a nice dramatization of it (I think originally BBC):
You can find the full text here
These activities are pitched at upper-intermediate, for young adults/adults.
I’m based in Bangkok, hence the personalisation in the first activity… (more…)
