Japanese Gameshow

This is an interactive video lesson that encourages the students to describe, compare and produce language in a natural way. It is a lesson that focuses on eliciting and practising advanced comparative forms. This is a five stage lesson.

Lesson aims:

• To engage the students.
• To produce natural English.
• To use comparative structures.
• To elicit descriptive language.
• Modals of obligation (for rules)

Stage One:

Mindmap vocabulary relating to gameshows (host, contestant, prize, etc)

Ask the students to talk about a typical gameshow from their country. Ask them to think about what kind of games are played and what the rewards are if the contestants win.

Stage Two (optional): Grammar focus

Review grammar for comparatives, focusing on structures you would like your students to practise.

Stage Three Video description:

This video is in Japanese, but it is very easy for the students to understand the game. Make sure your students know that this exercise is not for comprehension, but for description. If your students are Japanese, the activity will work in the same way.

Tell the students they are going to watch a gameshow in Japanese. Unless they are Japanese themselves, they are unlikely to understand what is being said. The objective of this exercise is to describe the game itself, the reactions of the contestants and what happens when those contestants fail.

Students watch the video and work in pairs to create a written summary and a list of rules.

Share some descriptions as a class. Error correction.

Stage Four

This video is in English. The game featured in the clip is a typical “guess the retail price” of the prize. The contestant is given $7 and is told the prize car can be bought for $1. The contestant must then guess each digit of the retail price of the car. For every number the contestant is off, he must give back $1. If the contestant has at least $1 at the end he may “buy” the car.The students have to understand the game and describe it.

Tell the students that they are now going to watch a clip from “The Price is Right.” Ask them if they know how it’s played. Watch the first part of the video and get the students to help you construct the rules for the game. They may need to watch this a few times.

Next, if you want to be more interactive – you can pause been guesses and have your students join in, guessing each digit themselves, to see if they would win the car.

Now have your students write a complete description of the gameshow, including contestant reactions, the cheesiness of the set, etc.

Stage Five

Get the students to write comparisons of the gameshows.

• The American gameshow rewards success, whereas the Japanese gameshow punishes failure.
• The closer the contestant is to winning the car, the ore excited he gets.
• The Japanese gameshow is crueller than the American one.

Follow up

You could now move into looking at cultural differences, practise more grammar. Young learners could design their own gameshow.

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.