C2 Lesson Plan – London Riots

C2 Reading London Riots Independent article

Read this great article after a twitter recommendation from @harrisonmike and immediately thought it would make for a better lesson for my Prof Twos this evening than what Proficiency Gold had in store for them.

It’s a reading lesson, that leads into further reading, summary writing and then full-blown article writing.  It’s in first draft mode at the moment, will update it after the lesson and following on from your comments.

Just a worksheet for now, reflective lesson plan to follow tomorrow hopefully after the lesson.  I realise there’s no vocab focus in a lexically rich text, but I only taught this class twice so not got much of a grip on what they’ll know or not, so will let them lead me on that – opening that can of worms I always tell my Celtees to leave on the shelf.

Wish me luck with the lesson and I hope it’s helpful to some of you too.

Post Lesson Update

A stimulating lesson – the students hadn’t heard much about the riots and were surprised such things were happening in the land of five o’clock tea.  They have much more experience of this type of thing happening much closer to home.  

In the lesson we did Task 4 before Task 3 – when creating the worksheet I was thinking the paragraph exercise was more gisty than the detailed task, but before class I decided they needed to understand the text in detail to be able to do this task justice and that was borne out in the lesson.

They were surprisingly critical of the article and the paragraph summary led to the realisation that the author was narrowing down the argument to promote her charity (paragraph three got particular criticism – mentioning social media just to sound trendy and cool?).  Having said that, it was interesting to see the students tended to summarise the paragraphs rather than discuss what their purpose was.  This will definitely lead in to a writing lesson where they try and emulate the paragraph model.

My worries about the vocab challenge of the text ended up being unfounded, they didn’t have problems with it all.  There were a couple of phrases (e.g. insidious flourishing) they didn’t quite get but nothing that detracted from their understanding of the article.

Am looking forward to their summaries – getting into the mind of the mob mentality was the follow up article they chose.  What about your students? Which article did they chose?