A designer lessons ESL Lesson plan developed by George Chilton
I think this would be a nice way to start off a discussion. Thanks to Gemma Lunn for pointing me in this direction – there are several One Question videos on YouTube. I’ve chosen this because it’s quite short and I like the production quality. If you want to see more like it check out Josiah Holwick.
This is a short post, but the looser the plan here, the better. I think the majority of the input and discussion should come from your students. The idea is to guide, monitor and correct the language. After each discussion point, stop the class and write errors on the board for peer correction. Look at the individual grammar points and expand upon them as necessary.
Lesson Aims
In Barcelona, they'd cut these up 'n rub them violently on to bread. Pa amb tomàquet.
- Discussion
- Second conditional in conversation
- Error correction
- Vocabulary building and listening comprehension
Stage One
Ask your students what they would ask if they could ask anything to the people of their city. Get them to share their answer with the class. I’m inclined to let each individual answer this question, but this clearly depends on numbers. You could always get them to discuss this in pairs or small groups if your class is crazy mega-big.
Stage Two
Ask students to write something down (they are willing to share) that would make them happy. They should keep this secret for the time-being. Then show the following video:
*You’ll have to view it on YouTube as they don’t allow embedding. Hint: use Zamzar.com to download the video. I hate relying on internet connections in class.
Students should put the following answers from the video in order. Put them in groups – each student should take about 4 answers and put them on the table in the order that they hear them. You’ll only need one set cut up for each group.
This is the correct order, though I have missed some out. The students could listen again and take down those which have not been included in the list:
- True happiness is definitely surrounding, being with my family.
- It would be an entirely weightless back pack, I could put anything I wanted into it and it wouldn’t weigh anything.
- For me, I think it would be a yacht
- Being a princess.
- Does money count?
- House, car – all that stuff.
- Can my tangible thing just be creating?
- Better food and better access to better food.
- Being able to wake up looking at him every day.
- Happy? I’m already happy.
- I would want a good wife. I had one, but she wasn’t good.
- It would be great; equality of opportunity, you know? The same for people that live in Haiti…or in Africa. That would make me happy. Equality of opportunities, brother, yeah.
- I’d like to be accepted by the world. I never have been.
- Increase people’s intelligence; what little they have – I don’t know if it’s possible.
- Making other people happy, seing other people smile.
- If I nail this audition that I have down at Sam’s Town Casino Las Vegas on Friday.
- My health; physical, mental and emotional.
Stage Three Possible discussion questions
- Did anyone say the same thing as they did?
- What was the most predictable answer?
- Which answer do they think was the strangest?
- What was the best answer?
- Do they think these answers would be typical in their country?
- Is there something that they particularly disagree with?
- If they could talk to any of the interviewees, who would it be and why?
Please share how your students reacted with us in the comments below.
Related articles
- This Is Your Life: student centred, natural English, dogme. (designerlessons.wordpress.com)
- You said what? An Unplugged Grammar Review of Question Formation, “memory and mingle”. (designerlessons.org)
- A kiss isn’t just a Kiss – 30-45 Minute Image Speculation Activity (designerlessons.org)
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
designer lessons 
You could also get your students to classify the answers that they hear, either in a way set by yourself or by creating their own groupings e.g. material things, intangible/emotional things, selfish things, things for other people etc. Or to rate them as to how far they agree with each idea. Going to try this lesson later this week (I love not planning!)
Ooh, good ideas. One thing I did with my group, that I failed to put in this plan, was to ask students to predict the type of person ( i.e. age, sex, presumed profession) to make the statement before they watched the video. That way they could then compare their preconceptions with reality. It made for an interesting discussion afterwards.
I used both Sophie and George’s ideas and they worked really well! When I did the prediction task I found that we ended up doing some work on the language and modals of deduction and speculation too. I also then did a “who said what” matching task with some stills I took from the video which was fun, although 17 comments are a lot to work with so I’d whittle it down to about 8 – 10 in the future.
Hi Vivien! It sounds like you had a good class touching on lots of points. I agree, 17 could be a lot to work with, especially if you want to focus on the language points – good idea to reduce the comments. I think I first did this in a 3 hour class, so I had more time to work with.
G
looks good, thank you
Thanks for sharing!