A designer lessons ESL lesson plan developed by George Chilton

Here’s a selection of four viral videos – taken directly from Youtube. It’s a simple prediction exercise, leading on to description using the narrative present simple and  fun to try out with pre-intermediate to intermediate teenagers. Each video needs to be paused at some point, so take note of the times – or you’re not going to have much in the way of predictions.

Lesson Aims:

• Language of prediction – will / going to for prediction.
• Descriptive writing
• Narrative present simple.

Stage one

Write the following sentences on the board:

A) It’s going to rain, look at the clouds.

B) I think England will win the World cup.

Ask your students what kind of sentences they are. Hopefully they’ll tell you that they’re predictions.

Now ask how the sentences are different. With luck they’ll notice one sentence uses will and the other is going to

Ask them if they can see which sentence is based on evidence and which sentence is a guess. If they’re on the ball, they’ll answer that A is based on evidence (the clouds) and B is a complete guess, based on nothing but nationalistic pride and desperate hope.

Follow up by asking whether we use will for guesses or for predictions based on evidence. Again, if you’re lucky, they’ll say we use Will for guesses.

Tell your students they are going to make predictions – and they should use the structure “Be + going to” – as they will have certain evidence.

You may need to model an example again.

Stage two – video predictions based on evidence.

Put your students in groups – ask them to make predictions based on some video clips. If you like, it can be a competition – the group with the closest answer wins a point.

Reinforce that they need to use the be going to structure.

Pause the videos at the indicated time and ask the groups to write some predictions down using is going to. They should do this individually at first, then share opinions. Each group should choose the most convincing answer – and tell the rest of the class.

Show the complete video and decide if any of the groups were close enough to win a point.

1. Pause this one straight away.

2. Pause this one after 20 seconds

3. Pause at 15 seconds

4. Pause at 2 secconds (before it zooms out).

Stage Three – Narrative Present Simple

To follow up, ask the class to choose their favourite video. They must write a description of the events using the narrative present simple.

The linesman is hit by a streamer, after which he grabs his head and falls to the ground. He pretends to be hurt causing much consternation among his colleagues.

You can correct their writing and give it to them back next class.

Question for commenters:

How else could you use these videos in a lesson?

Designer Lessons by George Chilton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Creado a partir de la obra en designerlessons.wordpress.com