LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this ESL social media lesson plan are to:

• assess the gravity of a social issue
• respond to information from a news report
• apply critical thinking skills to evaluate ideas 

Students watch a news report about the addictiveness of social media and discuss it at length. They also evaluate various ideas to address the problems social media pose and work with terms related to social media. 

This is a Speaking Class worksheet. It includes a variety of tasks that let your students practise their speaking skills. This lesson format does not focus on grammar or vocabulary. Learn more about it here.

WARM-UP & MATCHING

This ESL social media lesson plan starts with a warm-up task in which students look at three images and briefly discuss how they might be related to social media. Then, students read a list of statements and say whether they have ever had the thoughts or feelings described. They also need to expand on the familiar statements and say why people might have these thoughts and feelings. After that, students look at a list of ten terms and concepts (e.g. infinite scrolling, polarisation, doomscrolling) and pair them up into opposite meanings. They also have to explain in what way the terms represent opposite meanings in the context of social media.

VIDEO & DISCUSSION

In this part of the ESL social media lesson plan, students watch the first part of the video and discuss questions related to the problems described in the video. For example, they talk about the addictiveness of social media and filter bubbles. Then, they watch the second part of the video and have to complete sentences with what they remember from the video as well as their own ideas. Next, students are asked to comment on statements related to the overuse of social media among adolescents and lawsuits filed against social media. Finally, students look at some ideas to deal with the social media issue from the Advisory mentioned in the video. They need to evaluate them and explain where they would place them on a value/feasibility matrix provided in the worksheet.