| LESSON OVERVIEW
If you think your students know who Pac-Man, Mario and Lara Croft are, this is a lesson for you 
It’s based on a short history of video gaming and top 7 games that shaped that industry. It’s an interesting topic to look into as video games are no longer just for children or considered a waste of time. Or are they? Challenge your students and jump into the topic. BTW it’s a C1, or rather C2 lesson plan so expect some difficult new vocab for your students.
C2 / Proficiency75 minStandard LessonUnlimited Plan
WARM UP
Start the lesson with some warm-up discussion that introduces the topic. Exercise 1 provides a few questions around the topic of video games so that your students can kick off this C2 lesson plan with some speaking practice. Guide them to the box on the right that explains two words which they might be unfamiliar with.
VOCABULARY
The first vocabulary task here (exercise 2) is about synonyms. In the left column, you got some language from the video your students will watch in a few minutes. In the right one, they’ll find synonyms which they need to match.
Move on to a short pre-watch task, i.e. exercise 3. There you’ll find a list of 7 games that will be mentioned in the video. Ask your students to put them in chronological order, as an extra task you might ask them to try to guess the dates those games were published.
LISTENING COMPREHENSION
Exercise 4 is all about the video and listening comprehension. The video itself is 5-min long so make sure your students make some notes. Let them watch the video, compare their answers and correct any discrepancies – don’t play the video twice – you’ll have a chance to do so in a moment.
Exercise 5 focuses on fixed phrases and idioms from the video. The speaker uses a lot of elaborate language or idiomatic expressions so it’s a nice treasure trove of language items to teach. I’ve picked just a few most useful (common). As this is a C2 lesson plan, this might be even challenging for some advanced students but it wouldn’t fun if it was all piece of cake. Basically, in this task students need to fill in the gaps to complete expressions and try to guess the meaning of those phrases from context by matching them with provided definitions.
DISCUSSION AND DEBATE
Last section of this lesson plan is of course discussion and debate. There are just a few talking points related directly to the video (exercise 6) so give your students 7-10 minutes to go through them. Next task is a debate. If you run of time, ask your students to prepare for it at home. Otherwise, split them up into teams so that you have equal number of people in favour and against the topic. The background information that sets the debate up is taken from Kialo and that website also has plenty of arguments and counterarguments for that topic so make sure to go through them before the lesson in case you have to guide your students a bit when they’re getting ready for the debate.
EXTRA WORKSHEET – esports
Here we bring you an extra worksheet to go deeper into the world of video games to explore esports. This 2-page worksheet will let your students study some sport-related language, discover new words and synonyms through a listening comprehension task and discuss whether esports should be part of the Olympics or not. Explore this additional worksheet here.
WORKSHEETS
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Nice lesson. A small point: I don’t think ‘lustrous’ means ‘well-known’ or ‘amazing’, it just means shiny, as in ‘lustre’. Perhaps you mean ‘illustrious’? It does seem to be on the video that way as well so maybe they just meant ‘brilliant’, or got it wrong themselves. Anyway, I really appreciate the lessons you produce, I have used several and they always go down well. Thanks!
Hilary, the phrase she used was “long and lustrous history” as in glorious or brilliant history and so you’re right I should have put ‘brilliant’ rather than ‘amazing’. I tried to put something easy to match without the context and overdid it :). I guess I need to change it so it makes more sense.
To be fair I think the narrator made an error in the video itself (the set phrase / collocation is “a long and illustrious history”), and this has then moved on into the lesson…
Hmmm, seriously I thought that “long and lustrous” is a variation of that. I’ve seen it being used (probably erroneously) here and there. That reminds me of another video: https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/its-not-rocket-surgery-the-art-of-mangling-your-wo/p079j4sl
that link no longer works, this does https://x.com/bbcideas/status/1134029431016550400
Thanks Stan, nice video
Mark and Hilary, I’ve updated the worksheets and added the correct version of that phrase plus a short footnote in the Teacher’s Version to explain the situation. Thanks for pointing it out
Hello Stan, I would like to say that this class is simply amazing, my students completely loved it. It was a great success, I will definitely use it again. Thank you so very much for that, it saved my day.
Great to hear that! Thanks for nice feedback and enjoy the rest of the content on ESL Brains
Wonderful lesson! Thank you very much. Greetings from Brazil.
Thanks a lot! Greetings from Poland
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Could you please make an A2-B1 lesson for my students? They would love this topic!! Thank you!
That’s probably impossible with this video but we can revisit the topic for lower level students in the future. Can’t promise you anything but I’ll see what can be done.
This is a brilliant lesson! I can’t wait to bring it to my teenager ESL students—they absolutely love games and have been eagerly waiting for a topic like this.”
I wonder if they know any of these games – the list there are real classics! Nevertheless, I think the game industry is something that will resonate with many teens and make this an interesting lesson for them.
This was a good lesson, though unfortunately, the video linked no longer works.
Hi! We’ve just checked that and it works on our side. Please, check out the link in the e-lesson plan or PDF files and if you still experience the issue, reach out to as at hello@eslbrains.com.