US Travel Advisory France Part 1

In this class, the students studied a text entitled US Travel Advisory.Unfortunately I don't know the source of this text - a friend who had been an assistant suggested we use it when we were working as 'lectrices' at the university and it worked very well with the students!
Once we had established that it was a humorous text based on the stereotypes of the French we had already discussed or seen, I asked the students to work in groups of 3-4 and assigned them different paragraphs to work on. They had to identify criticisms and positive aspects of France as well as the advice given to American tourists and the image projected of these same tourists by the text. If we had time, we also discussed which stereotypes they thought were justified or not. I projected this worksheet to help the students organize their ideas.
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What is the BBC?

In this class, I presented the British Broadcasting Corporation to the students using these slides and they then characterized the organization together and also thought about its strategy, micro environment and how it differs from other organizations they've studied.

Geoff Marshall [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Job Interviews 3

In this lesson, the students did job interviews with each other to practise some of the language we've been talking about in the previous sessions (talking about strengths and weaknesses, your skills etc). We used the worksheet from eslflow, but only as a speaking activity, not a writing one.

Political Issues in the UK

In this follow up to the How Political Are You? class we talked about some of the main political issues facing the UK, notably the EU referendum and the risk of Brexit. There is a quick explanation in these slides of this concept as well as the details of the role play we started working on at the end of class. We worked on the video below from the Financial Times and the students noted down the pro-Europe and pro-Brexit arguments they heard. They then started preparing in their groups for a TV role play debate in which two Eurosceptics and two pro-Europeans have to convince an audience of undecided voters how to vote in the referendum. They used the infographic below from The Economist to add to their arguments.

How political are you?

I used this powerpoint with the terminale ES group to find out what they know about politics in the UK and France. The class ended with a lively debate about the French employment law reform. One of the students had been on the demonstration that day and was more than happy to discuss why he was against it.

Image via You Tube

St Patrick's Day Lesson

In this class we used the following material from Reward English: a quiz about Saint Patrick, Ireland and the Irish, a text to check the answers to the quiz and finally a crossword puzzle to review the new words and to learn more about the topic (the answers to all the clues are in the text). The students were surprised to learn that the official colour of Ireland is blue!

Stereotypes 2: The Simpsons, The Crêpes of Wrath Episode

This lesson follows on from the first Stereotpyes one. We used this worksheet and watched an episode from series one of the Simsons in which Bart goes to France. While watching, the students made notes on stereotypes, cultural references and positive and negative aspects of the following cultures/nationalities: American, French and Albanian.

Job Interviews 2

In this lesson, the students finished the worksheets about their good and bad points. We then used this infographic I made about the top ten skills employers want and compared it with the ideas they had written about themselves. They addeed new good and bad points as necessary. We then moved on to the "Get That Job!" board game to finish the lesson.

Top 10 Skills Employers Want
Create your own infographics

Stategy and the Ansoff Matrix

In this class, we worked on an article about the four different marketing strategies in the Ansoff matrix, particularly specialization and diversification. We used this worksheet to gain a deeper understanding of the terminology and the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies. Finally, we did this task to check that everyone had understood the new notions and to prepare for the Bac sujet for the following week.