ESL LESSON PLANS

 There are also countless activities that can accompany an audio short story which your students may complete individually or in groups. You can prepare a quiz to check how well they understood the plot and have a game show in teams; ask students to arrange the events in chronological order; use the transcript and remove some words and have them fill in the gaps while listening; pre-teach students some words and make sure they understand their meanings and then play the story and have them tick off the words from the list as they hear them.

 Apart from short stories, ESL Bits offers five other sections: classics, novels, novellas, intermediate and advanced material which can be used to encourage extensive reading and listening.

 If your goal is to develop your students’ critical thinking skills, then you should try Kialo – a free online discussion platform that can help promote thinking outside of the box. It will give your students the opportunity to really practise their reasoning, communication and collaboration skills.

 With Kialo, you set up debates on an interactive tree (for teams or individual users) and invite students to contribute, by adding their arguments for or against. During the debate, you can encourage them to include hyperlinks to support their arguments and then vote on their classmates’ good ideas. You can also chat with students about their arguments by clicking on them and writing a comment, encourage and congratulate them on good ideas or mark some arguments as wrong and let them know they’ve repeated something that has been said before.

 Kialo enables you to filter individual students’ contributions, which makes it easy to assess their performance when a task is finished. It can be used both synchronously and asynchronously. The former allows students to have an equal chance to contribute and can be used as class competition, while the latter makes it easy to focus on the quality and structure of a discussion (it works really well as a homework task!). Here you can see how we used some of the opinions found on Kialo to inspire a debate about the Universal basic income.

 There are many ways in which ESL teachers can incorporate it into their classes. It is definitely a very clear and visually attractive way of presenting new vocabulary. Check out our lesson Is e-sport a sport? to see how you can present new vocabulary related to the same topic using MindMup. It is also a perfect tool to show multiple meanings of a word (like in our lesson Do you feel FOMO? – phrasal verbs with out) or word associations.

 Another good idea is using it in an online class for group work planning (for example creating a storyboard for a book or video, or creating an essay outline) as well as brainstorming ideas.

 The authors of the last website ‘dream of a world where powerful visuals are used to explain anything and everything’. Their insightful infographics are used by lots of institutions all over the world and should definitely become part of an ESL classroom too.

 Do your students sometimes seem too tired to participate in speaking activities? Why not try and make them more engaged by using stunning data-driven visuals from Visual Capitalist.

 You can set up a discussion by asking students to interpret the data presented in an infographic or use it as a lead-in into the lesson theme to spark students’ interest. You can also make it even more challenging and use it in the practice stage, with students interpreting the data and at the same time producing the language studied earlier in the lesson.

 If you have already used any of the resources from these websites to create your own lessons, we look forward to hearing about your ideas. If you have just decided to try them with your students, don’t forget to let us know how they worked.

 You’re probably thinking about PlayPhrase.Me. BTW if you’re not their supporter, they will only show you 5 examples per search. But I strongly encourage you to support this awesome project 🙂

 In the age of so many possible subscription services, we are unlikely to find someone who hasn’t watched at least one hyped-up TV series. What’s more, we bet there are those among our students who know the schedule of all the releases and indulge in binge-watching from time to time. And that’s totally fine on condition they do it in English ?. But we can go further and use their love of TV shows in our lessons to make the studying process more compelling and the topic more memorable. Here are our suggestions for creating fun and low-prep ESL activities with TV series.

 When it comes to vocabulary, TV series are an ultimate source of collocations, slang, common speaking expressions and less common lingo. But let’s look at some practical applications that can be linked to various TV shows. One such thing is exploiting characters and their differences. And the first vocabulary topic that fits perfectly is adjectives describing personal qualities. Since it’s a universal thing for TV shows to have a range of characters with their little quirks, it gives us plenty of opportunities to practise vocabulary from elementary words like ‘shy’ and ‘honest’ to something more advanced like ‘adamant’ or ‘grumpy’. Take the well-known series The Office (either British or American). The show has a range of characters, the descriptions of whom would require more than one personality adjective. What we can do to make it more interesting is to ask students to choose their favourite character in the show and explain why they like them and their personality. The other option is to talk about the boss (David/Michael) – have students describe his personality and talk about what a good manager should be like.

 Another idea that is easy to implement is talking about professions. We could simply try asking our students what profession, for example, each character from Friends has, especially Chandler (spoiler: it’s not a transponster). We can also combine it with the adjectives for personality traits and ask students to explain how each quality might be helpful in a character’s profession. But we can go further and discuss how professions on TV are different from real life. We can discuss whether corporate lawyers have the same fancy lifestyle as presented in Suits, if being an executive equals having as much drama as the characters in Succession do, if being a police officer is as exciting and fun as they show it in Brooklyn 99, or if being a doctor is all about solving puzzles like they do in House M.D.

 While we’re on the topic of character description, it’s worth mentioning that they usually have different appearances too, and we can create a lot of fun and low-prep activities in this regard. For instance, it might be a simple guessing game where students describe one of the characters and the others have to guess who it is. For this activity, we’ll have to choose TV series with a lot of characters that have distinctive appearances, like Modern Family.

 But vocabulary in TV series is not only about characters. Each particular TV show might be famous for its costumes, scenery, architecture, etc. So depending on the topic we are covering, we can find a TV show that will have a lot of visual aids. For example, if we’re on the topic of clothes and our students also happen to be interested in fashion, let’s google Sex and the City outfits (or if we’re working with a younger demographic, Emily in Paris or Sex Education outfits), pull up a couple of pictures and make students describe them. Another idea is to google Rachel Green outfits. As the results vary from fancy and elegant clothes to some casual and sporty looks, we’ll have a lot of items of clothing to discuss.

 For many people, working with grammar is rarely about fun and low-prep ESL activities. It has to be arduous and time-consuming. And in some cases, that is what proves to be effective. However, we shouldn’t neglect the power of joy in the learning process and how much it can boost it.

 We have already seen how TV series are sometimes built around the idea of different people coming together. For us teachers it presents an opportunity to work with comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. For instance, we can use these adjectives to describe character traits and compare characters with one another. We can ask students questions like ‘Who is the most intelligent in the group?’ or ‘Who is the funniest?’ For it to work, we have to choose TV series with many contrasting characters like How I Met Your Mother or Friends.

ESL Lessons

 When it comes to comparison, it’s not only about characters. Why don’t we try and compare different TV series like How I Met Your Mother and Friends, or The Witcher and Game of Thrones if our students are into fantasy. To facilitate this, we might need to come up with categories like ‘humour’ or ‘romance’ for the first pair, and ‘dark tone’/‘violence’ and ‘plot twists’ for the second one.

 Another grammar topic that we can work with based on our favourite TV shows is conditional sentences. We can get really creative here but let’s take, for example, The Umbrella Academy characters with their powers. The activity could be focused on students answering questions such as ‘Which power would you choose? If you had this power, how would you use it?’ We could also use iconic scenes like this one from Workin’ Moms and ask students to imagine what they would do if they were in the character’s shoes.

 Finally, if our students are into detective TV series, there’s a great chance for us to practise modals of deduction. Take, for example, the acclaimed TV series Only Murders in the Building. It’s so full of secrets and plot twists that we can make hundreds of speculations. And luckily for us, each season ends with a mystery that we can hypothesize about. Or if we know that our students have just finished watching a season of Stranger Things and are looking forward to a new one, we can make them speculate about the future and ask what is likely to happen to Eleven and the gang in the next season.

 All the activities above are applicable only if we know what TV series our students are into. And if it’s relatively easy to do when we have individual classes, quizzing all students in a group on their TV preferences might seem a little redundant. So here are a couple of suggestions on how to do it in a more engaging way.

 First, we could do a full lesson related to films and TV series. We have a few lesson plans that might be helpful for this (Let’s binge watch it together, Why do we like horror films?, Let’s go to the movies!, Question Time!), because students are bound to share some details about their interests during such lessons.

 Instead of devoting a whole lesson to this topic, we can have a short warm up that might help us get the necessary information. For example, we can split students into pairs, ask each of them to choose their favourite TV show and convince their partner to watch it.

 The other easy-to-implement thing is to ask whether they’d like to be a character in any TV series and make them explain why. Remember that such things work best when students have a good sample answer to follow, so we have to be ready to share something as well.

 Summing it all up, we agree that students have different interests and needs. But if there’s something that they all share, it’s the craving for entertainment, the possibility to switch off sometimes and distract themselves from daily problems. And if we can give it to them without taking away the teaching component, TV series might be just the means for that. Do you agree? Do you like using TV series in your lessons? We’d be happy to hear your thoughts!