What makes start-ups succeed?

Stan | Jun 11, 2017May 16, 2023

LESSON OVERVIEW

During this TED lesson, students will learn useful jargon from the Silicon Valley and some nice collocations that will help them talk about start-ups and launching a new company in our world of technology.

TEACHING ENGLISH VOCABULARY FOR START-UPERS

After a short warm-up discussion, students get to know 8 jargon expressions used commonly by start-upers (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 start-ups. In exercise 4, there are 10 collocations connected with start-ups. 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 start-ups comes the video part. The video for this lesson is a TED talk titled The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed by Bill Gross who talks about the most important factors behind start-ups’ successes. There is a brainstorming task as a pre-listening (watching) exercise, where you students must come up with top 5 success factors for start-ups. 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.

WORKSHEETS

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