| LESSON OVERVIEW
This selfie lesson plan deals with a very popular phenomenon of taking selfies and posting them on social media. One of our members wrote us an email that it could be a good idea to talk about during ESL classes and we totally agree. Thank you, Jay!
DISCUSSION & WORD FORMATION
The worksheet starts with a few discussion points concerning selfies. They focus on students’ own attitude and preferences when it comes to taking photos of themselves. Next, students move to a short word formation task. They need to complete gaps in sentences with correct forms of words given in brackets. These words were not randomly selected as they will be used in the next task. After completing, students move to a list of aspects that motivate people to take selfies (the list is based on 2017 research on ‘selfitis‘, i.e. the obsessive taking of selfies). They need to complete motivations with nouns they created in the previous exercise. Then, they need to discuss them and tell what aspects in their opinion motivate people most often to take selfies.
VIDEO & VOCABULARY
The next activity involves watching a short video and writing down all reasons why the interviewed people take selfies and post them on social media. The video is a pretty short and dynamic street interview with some New Yorkers. Let your students listen to it twice so that they can find out all motivations.
Next, they move to a vocabulary task which include words and phrases from the video. Students read the sentences from the video and match underlined words and phrases with their correct meanings. Your students might ask about them just after they’ve seen the video, so remember not to explain them at that point. Afterwards, your students will have an opportunity to talk about issues mentioned the video and the whole ‘selfie culture’.
We’ve also come up with an idea for a fun section in this selfie lesson plan. What we did is pick 6 phrases connected with social media and photos that people often use nowadays. You can challenge your students by writing those words on the board before you show them page 3 and let them brainstorm possible meaning of these words (one of them, i.e. ‘ug’ was used at the end of the video). If you don’t have time, let them study the words and their meaning and ask them whether they’ve seen those expressions being used online and IRL 🙂
This is a great lesson plan. It generated so much meaningful discussion. Thanks very much!
Thanks! I’m happy the lesson is useful 🙂