| LESSON OVERVIEW
Through this lesson plan on memory, students will learn the differences between the verbs remember, recall, recollect and remind as well as watch a video about a person with superior autobiographical memory.
VOCABULARY
As a warm-up activity, students have to complete the questions with correct prepositions that go with the word memory. Then, they need to answer them. After that, they move to another task on vocabulary. This time they read some sentences which include the verbs remember, recall, recollect and remind. They have to match them to their meanings and in one case, they can match more than one verb to a specific meaning. To practise and see more examples including the verbs, students complete the sentences by choosing the correct verb.
VIDEO & DISCUSSION
The lead-in to a video is a short discussion. Students need to answer questions which include the verbs they practised before. Next, they watch the video (only up to 4:10) for the first time and just need to get a general idea about superior autobiographical memory. By the way, the video is from Australian TV and it features an American actress so you have a mix of Australian and American English accents here. We like using videos with some Australian speakers as very often this accent is not featured in ESL coursebooks. When watching the video again, students have to answer some comprehension questions. Finally, this lesson plan on memory ends with a discussion about the ability of the person presented in the video.
it looks very interesting. thank you 🙂
Happy to hear that 🙂
Thanks a lot, it´s a great lesson plan!
🙂
Hi ya, have been visiting your wonderful site for a while now, and I always find your choice of topic and lesson plans extremely useful. Thank you very much.
We’re really happy you enjoy and find our materials useful 🙂 Thanks for your comment!
My students really enjoyed this lesson. I asked them to write an article about the topic and they wrote some really interesting pieces. Thanks for the lesson.
Great to hear that! And thanks for the idea for a writing task!
Where do you think the narrator is from? I can’t really place her accent. My guess is Australian/New Zealand
Right, the reporter Allison Langdon is Australian 🙂
Excellent lesson plan. The video and discussion questions were also great. Thank you
Thanks, Matt!
Hello Justa, thank you for these lessons, they are great!
I have cut the video and added subtitles, so if anyone wants to use it during the class you can download it here:
https://ulozto.net/file/vyLCmsnJ9fia/the-limits-of-human-memory-mp4
and here:
https://ulozto.net/file/AwWXMI8VDfD4/the-limits-of-human-memory-subtitles-srt
Alzbeta, thank you so much for you comment and sharing the links with us 🙂
Actually, you’re happy to READ that! 😀
I have used it twice now in flipped online 1-on-1 lessons at two different levels, B1 and advanced. Both learners did the warm-up task and watched the video before our lesson. For the B1 learner (45 min lesson) I found a simpler video about the same subject and concentrated in the lesson on the vocabulary remember/remind/recall. For the more advanced learner (60 min lesson) I included all the discussions. Both learners found it interesting and felt they learnt something from it. So Thank you for sharing it.
Thank you so much for the feedback and I’m happy your students enjoyed the lesson!
Hi! Could you tell us which video you used for B1 learners?
Just used this lesson with my 1:1 intermediate students this week and they loved it! Really interesting topic. Thank you.
Great! Thanks for commenting!
Excellent class! Thank you very much!
Excellent material!
Great lesson, thanks very much for putting it together. It would also be very helpfu to have access to the full transcript of the video. Do you think you could add that to your future lessons?
Hi! Thanks for the comment. We’re not planning to put transcripts on our website because very often these are already available on YouTube. Isn’t that great? You just need to click the elipsis button under the video player and click Open transcript. Mind you that more often than not the transcript is auto-generated which means it’s not perfect but still usable 🙂 TED Talks have full transcripts as well, and these are done by professionals so their quality is impeccable.
Thanks for your reply and the info!
This is my first visit to your site. It is full of useful materials. I plan to explore it more. Thank you so much.
Welcome to ESL Brains! We hope you and your students enjoy our materials!
It’s very interesting and makes the student focused.
Thanks for the comment 🙂