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.

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.

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.