A designer lessons ESL lesson plan developed by George Chilton
This is a very easy lesson to prepare, there’s no technology involved and it genuinely makes the students think. It’s good for generating discussion and the natural use of conditionals in conversation in adult GE or business classes. You won’t know where this is going because after the initial stage, the students will generate all the language. It will be down to you to guide and correct them.
Stage One
Give your students a list of sentences taken from the picture below, only give them one half – ask them to complete the sentences , some of which are conditionals, in groups of 3/4. I’ve given you some below to get you started. I find it’s nice to throw in a couple of complete sentences too, just so they know the tone they’re going for. Either way, you’ll find you get a mixture of serious and amusing answers from the group. There will also be lots of little mistakes, which is great because you can take the opportunity to do error correction – teach, reinforce and revise grammar points.
This is your life:
Do what you love, and_____________________.
If you don’t like something,__________________.
If you don’t like your job,________________.
If you don’t have enough time, _____________________.
If you are looking for the love of your life,______________________;__________________________.
Start doing things you love.
Stop over-analysing, _________________________.
When you eat, ______________________.
Life is simple.
Travel often; ___________________________.
Stage two – conversation
Now show each group the picture,which you can project or distribute. Get them to compare their answers with the original. Ask the groups to say what they agree and disagree with. Make sure to correct mistakes (in Spain you’ll get a lot of the “I am agree” type error). Now ask them, in turn to read a sentence they wrote to the rest of the class People should ask questions and the speaker should explain why the group decided to write what they did. If your group is talkative, you’ll generate natural debate. Good luck!
Holstee Manifest Poster
Fin!
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
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designer lessons 
Oh, I really like this! Thanks 🙂
You’re welcome Jo!
where’s the picture?
It still seems to be there, try refreshing
Oh yay! Can’t wait to try this tonorrow. I love the dogme approach. I hate preparing handouts and photocopying excercise after excercise.
Thanks a billion for this!
uhm… i am sorry but I’ve tried this one and my feedback is negative. I’ve brought this lesson plan to a few students (10) in 2 different classes. The first part flows naturally, they like writing and/ or thinking about it, though some of them already raise concerns about the sensible topics of ‘finding real love’ and ‘not liking something/ your job’: they comment on how disturbed they feel by the topic as it’s too personal, it touches personal issues and so forth.
Then the second part came out pretty bad in both cases: students got very depressed and made depressed comments once they read the original. They didn’t feel like sharing their agreement/ disagreement on the statements and kept repeating how depressed they felt once they left the lesson.
Overall, the lesson plan is partially good (partially because the last part doesn’t stimulate discussion) but the topic, the content of the picture has a very negative impact on the students’ mood and participation.