Lesson Plan: Travel Guide – What to Do in…

This is a lesson plan based on this blog post: https://whatoliviadid.com/2016/09/how-to-spend-48-hours-in-copenhagen/.

Skills: Reading, FL, speaking

Level: B1-B2

Learning objectives – by the end of the lesson, students will have:

been introduced to a range of functional exponents to make travelling recommendations;
practised using these exponents in speaking/writing by making recommendations on what to see and do in a city they have visited in the past.

Duration: 60 minutes

Materials: This article, this vocabulary match task, and these slides.

Notes: Can be used with both groups and individual students

Lesson Procedure

0. LEAD-IN

1) I usually start with checking homework because typically, I assign a speech that has to include grammar or vocabulary we covered in the previous lesson.

2) Ask students to discuss these questions:

Do you like travelling?
Did you use to travel a lot before COVID-19?
What are the three places you want to visit the most?

I. READING

1) Show the photo of Copenhagen and ask students if they know which city it is. If no one knows, tell them.

2) Students do the vocabulary match activity (answers – Slide 1)

3) Distribute the copies of the reading (How to Spend 48 Hours in Copenhagen). Let students read it. Walk around and help with any other unfamiliar words.

4) Ask students to discuss some follow-up questions in pairs, e.g. which of the places mentioned in the article they would like to visit the most.

II. FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE

1) Ask students to find all phrases in the text which are used for making recommendations (answers – Slide 2). If they struggle, use the first phrase (If you’re looking for somewhere… then [place name] is one to note down) as an example.

2) Show students the slide with all phrases from the article and ask them to quickly analyse the form, i.e. do we use verbs in these phrases? nouns? what’s the form of the verb in each phrase? You can create a gap-fill or a spot-an-error exercise to focus on form.

3) Ask students to come up with their own examples for each phrase using any of the cities they’ve been to. Can be either a writing task or a speaking task.

III. PERFORMANCE

Students choose one of the cities they’ve been to and tell each other about things to do there using the new language. Give them some time to prepare and look for a couple of pictures to show. If they have some photos stored in their smartphones, encourage them to use those.

HOMEWORK:

Students have to write a blog post about a city of their choice in their home country. It should be similar to the article they read during the lesson and must include pictures. Tell them to be mindful of copyright! (i.e. they either have to provide links for all pictures or use free image stock websites).

Ideally, if your students wish, they could publish their final pieces on some travel website, or use some parts of it to post reviews on, for example, Tripadvisor.

Here’s the opening part of the article my student wrote (shared with her permission) – she did a great job and managed to use not only the target language but some of the expressions from the original text! I guess this means it was a success 🙂