The single biggest reason why startups succeed

B2

Startup jargon

60 mins

As most teachers wanted us to prepare more lessons about technology and business, this lesson plan combines both of these worlds as it focuses on teaching english vocabulary used when talking about startups . During this TED lesson, students will learn useful jargon from the Silicon Valley and some nice collocations that will help them talk about startups and launching a new company in our world of technology.

LESSON OVERVIEW

The worksheet consists of two main sections: pre-video vocabulary and post-video discussion. It starts with some tasks for teaching English vocabulary around technology, a video-related exercise and ends with a group discussion.

Teaching English Vocabulary for Startupers

After a short warm-up discussion, students get to know 8 jargon expressions used commonly by startupers (including words like ‘bleeding-edge, ‘freemium’, ‘bootstrap’, etc.). Next comes a practical task where they need to use new vocabulary and discuss some issues connected with the world of startups. In exercise 4, there are 10 collocations connected with startups. Students must match the phrases from two columns to create those collocations. It can be a tough exercise to but it’ll make the listening comprehension easier as most of them are used in the video. After that, students will learn the meaning of the most idiomatic of these collocations. Because exercise 5 includes 5 definition of the collocations from the previous task.

Listening Comprehension and Discussion

After teaching English vocabulary for startups comes the video part. The video for this lesson is a TED talk titled The single biggest reason why startups succeed by Bill Gross who talks about the most important factors behind startups’ successes. There is a brainstorming task as a pre-listening (watching) exercise, where you students must come up with top 5 success factors for startups. Afterwards they watch the TED talk and see what factors the speaker names and compare with their ideas.

Finally, the last activity in this lesson plan is focused on discussion. There are 4 talking points related to the ideas from the TED talk that allows students to use newly learned vocab and discuss the ideas from the speech.

This TED worksheet should take students about 60 minutes and that includes 6:30 mins of video. 

WORKSHEETS TO DOWNLOAD

See our other tech-related lesson plans here