LESSON OVERVIEW

In this lesson plan on LinkedIn students discover how to create a successful professional profile, practise their listening skills and write a LinkedIn profile summary.

VOCABULARY & LISTENING

In the lead-in activity students are familiarised with the term personal branding and brainstorm the benefits of social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Their next task starts with listening for gist – students watch the first part of a video about how to create a successful professional profile on LinkedIn and guess the speaker’s attitude to the platform. This part is followed by a reflection on students’ own LinkedIn profiles and possible improvements, leading to a vocabulary exercise. Students match sentence halves with highlighted words and phrases which they’ll later hear in the next part of the video (e.g. gain traction, miss out on something, scour). To make sure they understand their meaning, students then paraphrase them and compare their ideas. The vocabulary exercises prepare students for the next listening task – listening for details, in which they focus on answering six questions. Finally, they move on to the last vocabulary exercise in the lesson and match verbs to phrases creating collocations (e.g. spark a discussion, craft your narrative). The last part of the video allows them to check whether their answers were correct.

PARAPHRASING ACTIVITY & PROFILE SUMMARY

The post-listening part of the lesson starts with a discussion inspired by the tips from the video. Students decide whether they agree or disagree with them. Then, they get another opportunity to practise their paraphrasing skills. They analyse sample sentences from LinkedIn profiles and rewrite them to avoid cliches. The perfect way to finish this lesson is by asking students to write their own LinkedIn profile summary following the advice of the expert from the video. They might later share their summaries with their partners to get peer feedback.