All Viralelt posts consist of three parts: an embedded viral video, 10 conversation questions (Question time) and a listening activity (Sitting comfortably?).
1. The embedded viral video
Show your students the video a few times and ask them for their reactions. Although most videos are less than 2 minutes long, and are often without dialogue, they should be sufficiently engaging to provoke quite lengthy open-class discussions. You may like to exploit a video further by doing one of the following activities:
1. Videotelling : telling the “story” of a video orally.
2. Write-ups : writing short paragraphs giving reactions/opinions.
3. Predicting : stopping a video and predicting what comes next.
4. Speculating : playing sound only and imagining what is happening.
5. Roleplays : roleplaying the people who appear in a video.
6. Vocabulary input : using the video to elicit vocabulary.
2. Question time
Put your students into pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss the 10 conversation questions. These normally involve students reflecting more deeply on the video and the issues it raises. If you wish, draw your students’ attention to the words, collocations and lexical phrases that have been highlighted in blue.
3. Sitting comfortably?
Sitting comfortably? is a recording of a person answering one (or more) of the 10 conversation questions in Question time. Play the recording and ask your students to identify which question is being discussed. If you think picking 1 from 10 is too challenging, reduce the number of questions students should focus on e.g. Questions 4 to 8. The choice and design of tasks for subsequent listenings is up to you: possibilities include true/false questions, note-taking of key points, comprehension questions, putting events in order etc. At the end of each post you will find a downloadable version of the script in Word format. Feel free to edit this in any way you choose.
As regards language input, emphasis has been given to lexis rather than grammar. With this mind, an attempt has been made to include word combinations such as collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms, polywords and sentence frames. These have been highlighted in red and should ideally be revisited in future lessons (see below). If you think the number of highlighted expressions may overwhelm your students, you can recolour text by editing the downloadable script.
4 ideas for revisiting vocabulary
a) Gapfilling (with or without the first letter)
b) Students complete sentences using their own ideas
c) Conversation questions incorporating key vocabulary
d) Matching beginnings and ends of sentences
