Demo lesson: Practicing English vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar using Stranger Things

Para português, clique aqui.

In this quick demo, I and my student Isadora do a bit of freer practice on language she has just learned.

The goal is to bring language she has learned into a context she is familiar with and enjoys. This is her second English lesson, so she is mastering numbers, subject pronouns, possessive adjectives, have/has and like/likes.

The background to this lesson:

On her needs analysis session, I asked her to write me a page with everything she already knew in English. I soon realised she had been watching Stranger Things on Netflix, and also that she was probably a false beginner:

The book

We are using English World 2 in her lessons and this is content from unit 1. It’s not the most complete, but easy to adapt. I started off with this listening task.

English World 2 unit 1

Because I knew she wasn’t a complete beginner, I covered the text and challenged her to listen for specific information (you might want to pre-teach backpack if you do so). First, she had to listen for their their ages, then the number of siblings they had, then what they liked.

With real beginners, you might want to pre-teach words like sister/brother and numbers from zero to 10.

Visual aids

Together, we created this little guide so she could have a bit of visual aid on what language to use to talk about herself. Then, I showed her a sample of how to talk about the kids from the audio (third person singular). We played memorise the text. I had her read and try to remember as much information as she could to talk about the kids on the pictures:

As part of her freer practice, I showed her the numbers up to 20 and had her talk about the characters of Stranger Things, which I already knew she liked. I was very pleased with how easy it was for her to understand what the content we had covered was used for. She was thrilled and is now preparing a presentation on the entire Stranger Things’ cast. She will tell me all about their names, ages, siblings and something they have and like.

What about you guys?

I’d love some more ideas on what to engage with my tweens!