What do a cat, an urn and a tall story have in common? They all feature in one of my favourite scenes from Meet the Parents, the highly entertaining, occasionally cringe inducing, sometimes laugh out loud funny story of a man who tries too hard to please his future parents-in-law.
This activity begins with a vocabulary game, leads on to some watching and listening, and finishes off with some pronunciation and prediction. And hopefully it will raise one or two laughs along the way.
As a “mature” EFL teacher, I have fond memories of the classic comedy show “The Two Ronnies” on the BBC. Among their most famous sketches was one which took place in a hardware shop and is known simply as Four Candles. It was based entirely on complicated but very clever puns or double meanings. This week’s post is an updated version of that sketch starring the survivor of the original duo, Ronnie Corbett, but this time set in a fruit shop. It’s a little piece of scriptwriting genius, and I think I can guarantee that all students will get it from the brilliant opening exchange……
I met Sophie Pietrucci, a teacher in Paris at TESOL France at the beginning of November. She had also spotted the classroom potential of My Blackberry Is Not Working and made a worksheet, which you can find here:
After a long summer break and a very busy start to the new term, we’re back to update our neglected blog with a lesson based on Steve Job’s 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.
In the speech, he told three stories about his life – stories which were quite personal, very revealing and extremely motivational - and the speech went on to be a huge success on YouTube. Since his death on 5 October 2011, extracts from the speech have been widely quoted in the media. The text is reproduced in full here .
We decided to use this speech both as a listening exercise, to start with, but more importantly as a good example of public discourse in terms of chunking, rhythm, stress, and rhetorical techniques.
I love activities which really push students’ vocabulary skills to the limit and help make them more aware of what exactly they can and can’t do. With that in mind, this kind of back-to-back viewing activity in pairs is a great example and can be done with almost any piece of film. But of course it’s better if it’s action-packed or funny or, in this case, both….
In 1994 to promote the film “Il Postino” Miramax released The Postman (Il Postino): Music From The Miramax Motion Picture, which, besides the film’s score, includes Pablo Neruda’s poems recited by many celebrities. Today’s lesson is based on the beautiful reading of Love Poem No. 20 by Andy García. It’s a translation exercise and, although the example here is from the original Spanish, I’ve included links to versions of the poem in other languages. It appears to be very easy to find in almost any language on the web as it’s so famous. What I like about using poetry is that it makes people think about how to express themselves in a much more creative way. And of course, there isn’t necessarily a correct answer…
In this lesson students watch two clips from the TV series The Walking Dead, which is based on the graphic novel of the same name. First, students predict the title of the TV series from the word cloud, which is made up of most of the words in this newspaper article . Then they test their observation skills by watching the first scene of the first episode and answering some true/false statements about it. The next task is to listen to a spoken description of a scene, note down key words, reconstruct and then watch the scene in order to identify the differences between the two. Finally, students talk about a scene from a TV series or film which sticks in their mind for some reason.
This activity is based on the beautifully animated Aardman clip Blind Date. Apart from finding or downloading the clip, there’s no preparation required. The activity starts off with a vocabulary game and finishes with storytelling. Between the two, students watch the clip, order the vocabulary and predict the ending. I’ve done this activity with several classes over the last few months and they’ve all really enjoyed it.
This song has long been a guilty pleasure, and one that I feel I can admit to now that a reasonable amount of time (27 years!!) has gone by. I originally just thought of using it for the nice chunks of colloquial language it contains, but then realised I could exploit it for pronunciation purposes. Specifically, for those “shoulda, coulda, woulda” phrases that students often have such difficulty saying quickly and convincingly. But of course it would also be a crime to use this song and not discuss the hilariously sartorially-suspect low-budget video……
There are two versions of the worksheet. This one uses translation from L1 to L2 in the first activity, in this case Spanish to English:
