B2 Listening lesson – The Kinks – Dedicated Follower of Fashion
This is a lesson I’m teaching Monday morning as an observed lesson on the CELTA. It’s based on Unit 3A of Straightforward Upper Intermediate (Kerr & Jones, Macmillan 2006) – an excellent course book, as course books go.
The worksheet provides a lead-in and a test-teach-test vocab pre-teach stage.
The second page is a word grab which can serve as both the freer practice for the vocab and the gist task for the listening. If you don’t have the Straighforward book for the detailed listening, I’m sure you’ll find the links online.
Enjoy, and as always if you do use the materials please let us know how you get on.
Post-Lesson Update
The lesson went well this morning and the students did lots of talking, learnt some new idiomatic (and I think quite useful) vocab and did some intensive listening practice. They said they enjoyed the song and their continued exploration of British tribal culture (I wonder if the Celtees will mention the riots at any point?)
The level was actually more challenging than I’d thought it would be, for quite a strong Upper Intermediate (B2) class. The vocab was mostly new, as expected, and they were motivated to learn it and try to use it. In the teach stage we looked at flatter and flattered as well as flattery – all useful stuff. Some fun drilling ensued, with me giving them compliments or criticisms and them replying I’m flattered or reacting angrily to criticism.
The listening was challenging. The vocab grab was fun,. but there was a lot of misgrabs (probably because of all the f-words), so it needs careful monitoring. They were able to decide on the correct part of speech successfully most of the time but had quite a bit of trouble deciding which words went in which gaps – this needs plenty of time and careful monitoring to be successful, but it’s a more worthy exercise than just listening and filling – it really gets them to think about the meaning of the vocab and how to decide what goes where through context.
Just wish I’d got through the warmer quicker and left more time for feedback after the detailed listening, but at least I know now this will be a whole 90 minute lesson with my Advanced Ones tomorrow.
Post Advanced One Lesson Update
As suspected, this material easily filled up an hour and a half at Advanced One level (C1). They had a lot to say about the best brands and why they liked them and we corrected their pronunciation of a few labels and clothes words. I was surprised to find they didn’t know any of the pre-teach vocab words except one student who knew flatter, so the test stage was a tad demotivating for them. But they enjoyed learning the new vocab and we had lots of personalised examples of flattery and flitting and fads (apparently fur-lined boots are the fad of the moment?). They were able to do the part of speech exercise very well and that helped them a lot to predict which words went in which gaps, but it took them time and they didn’t get them all, but once they listened most of them were able to fill the gaps correctly. Definitely a challenging listening, motivating vocab and it fitted in nicely with a word formation exercise in their course book (Advanced Expert – Page 61) about fashion and buying trends. All in all a fun and useful lesson – I recommend it!
A Muse Amuses 
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