So this lesson uses a fantastic newspaper article from the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/eight-words-sexism-heart-english-language
It was one of those things I read and knew I had to make a lesson about.
The lesson focuses on collocation, vocab building and reading skills if you fancy going down that route, as ever, you are welcome to pick and choose bits and pieces.
Aims: build awareness of collocation / get students to respond to a text naturally
Level: Advanced / strong upper Ints could cope if it is scaffolded
Time: This really depends on how the conversation part goes but you will need a bare minimum of 1hr, I think 1.30-2hrs is more realistic.
Procedure:
Introducing collocation:
- Ask St’s in pairs to come up with 6 collocations for ‘Pop’ on the worksheet. They can then read the first paragraph of the text to check if there collocations were the same.
- Write the word ‘Rabid’ on the board. Now ask students to look at the second paragraph and look for the collocation for the word rabid. Ask them to think about what the word ‘rabid’ means.
- Ask them to complete the second diagram using words from the text.
- Ask students to think about recording their new vocab along with words that collocate with them, to help them to be more natural when speaking and writing. You could at this point direct them to the British National Corpus, or show them how to look for collocations online from any other sites you may use.
http://phrasesinenglish.org/searchBNC.html
Reading:
Feel free to completely change this section adding gist questions or scanning tasks, but what I wanted here was two things:
- to get students to react in a more natural way to the text.
- to get students to create their own questions to set for each other. ( I should add here that it was partly to encourage learner autonomy and to test their ability to write synonyms but also to get them to think about how an examiner might write the question. Therefore, I monitored them closely, helping with synonyms and little grammar fixes here and there).
You could, if you have a nice even number, cut up the 8 words and get the students to read them and then tell the other students about them, a jigsaw reading of sorts.
Otherwise follow the questions on the worksheet.
Reflection:
Having had a chat to a friend about some of the attitudes of her students recently, I was keen to put a reflection section into this lesson, they feature in lots of our lessons, but this one is thinking more globally about language. This could result in a big discussion or be over in 6 minutes, really depends on your students. Go with whatever feels right.
Vocabulary:
Again, as part of training students to be more autonomous the idea here is to get them to try to work out the meaning of words using their context. They can then check them against a-f
As always, if there are any changes you put in, let us know and tell us how it goes.
Materials:
textploitation 