Real Beauty? Free downloadable lesson.
Nowadays, Dove’s advertisement – Dove Really Beauty Sketches– is very popular. The video shows differences between how women view themselves and how others see them. Every time I check my facebook account, this recent advertisement appears on my newsfeed shared by my students and friends.
Having realized its popularity, I started to think how this video could be used in the classroom. As videos are meta materials -empty’ pedagogical procedures, teachers can decide on different activities depending on the level of the students. This video could be used while describing people or teaching adjectives related to physical appearance. For low-level students, more simple words and adjectives like thin,fat, long,short ,blonde/straight/curly hair can be taught. On the other hand, the video is a valuable source to teach more upper level classes as there are a lot of advanced vocabulary in it. For example, When describing people collocations like prominent jaw/cheekbones, spiky hair, a heart-shaped face were used.
Rachael Roberts, a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer, created an amazing lesson regarding this video. Her lesson starts by focusing on collocations to describe facial features, such as thick hair, full lips and so on. Students then watch the video and discuss some of the issues raised, including self -esteem, the role of the media,and differences between men and women. More language to describe physical appearance is ‘pulled out’ of the video, and the lesson ends with students writing detailed descriptions of themselves. (http://elt-resourceful.com/2013/04/26/real-beauty-free-downloadable-lesson/)
Brilliant lesson Rachael Roberts created – elt-resourceful-real-beauty
I think we don’t need to stick to a coursebook during the lesson. We can have effective lessons with videos if we apply appropriate activities to them. At the university where I worked, we had to use coursebooks to standardize the education and the duration of each lesson was 90 minutes which could be considered as quite long. In such cases, if we keep teaching through the same material, it can be a coursebook or video, learners will probably lose their attention. That’s why, mixing things up can be a good way to engage the learners.