C1 Lesson Plan – Reading: Facebook, more harm than good

C1 Reading lesson – Facebook, more harm than good

I’m on a roll today – another tweet (can’t remember who from I’n afraid – if you know, let me know) tipped me off to this article on facebook so I’n gonna use it as a springboard to discuss how to use Facebook with my Advanced One class.

Another reading lesson with the detailed task focussing on the opinions put forward in the article and a follow up speaking that encourages critical thinking and has built in preparation time. 

Unlike the C2 reading on the London riots, this lesson does also have a vocab focus – will be interesting to see if it works – will let you know.  Looks like Scrabble will have to wait for homework.

Post-Lesson Update:

I was very pleased with how these materials went in the class.  The students are bright and demanding fifteen year old kids and thankfully they found the topic engaging.  Obviously they didn’t agree with the premise of Rosen’s study but they were able to come up with a long list of possible harm that Facebook can cause (although none of them seem to happen to any of them or their friends, of course) which meant the gist task was effective.  

The detailed task also worked well, since there were some disagreements about a few of the questions, so they really had to go back to the text and give evidence for their answers.  And then they were able to use the vocab phrases successfully on the whole, although they did need some cajoling to go back and try and use the context to think of a further example.  It was interesting to see that ‘feeds in to’ caused lots of problems, not least for me to think of other possible uses off the top of my head (I could only think of the Argentine President feeding in to the country’s love of football and using it to win her election campaign) – has anyone got any other suggestions.  

We didn’t have time for the discussion section, which was a shame, since that was the task I most wanted to see if it worked – next time round.  Homework was to use the vocab phrases in a connected paragraph and post them to the Facebook group page, oh, and start playing Scrabble on Facebook too.  

Would love to hear from anyone else who’s used the materials.  Sorry for the typos btw, will fix them when I get to work.  More lesson materials coming soon…

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