BAD DIGESTION AND ALIENS (GEMA QUIJADA)

I am a teacher in a bilingual secondary school and there’s one extra period of classes one day per week with the groups belonging to the bilingual section.

I normally like using different things for these classes because they are from 14.15 to 15.05 and students are very tired after having spent all the morning in the school. I usually devote these hours to speaking activities and I very often use story seeding with the different groups that I have.

I have chosen the advertisement in the link because it is humorous and matches the topic from the unit that we are studying now. At the moment we are dealing with the future and we have also been discussing space travel.

The group I will be using this video with is a 4th ESO group and the textbook used is a B2 level. However, not all of my students have the same level and using this technique helps them match their productions to their own level.

Firstly, I would show students some images of a “monster, flag, hole, astronauts, baked beans and rocks” and elicit from them the different words.

Then, I am going give them some pieces from a text that I have written describing the story so that they build their own version; for example: “farted”, “a huge, bulky monster”, “had eaten baked beans”, “a group of astronauts”, “planting a flag on the Moon”, “out of a hole”, “knocked astronauts off”, “hid behind a rock”.

Then, I would ask students to either narrate the stories as a speaking activity or write them on a piece of paper. We would also read them out loud because they are not a very big group and we usually have time for them all to participate.

As soon as we are done with this part, I am going to show them the video and, as the ending is open, I could also integrate all the grammar that we have covered up to now this year: they can invent what the astronauts were doing two hours before trying to plant the flag on the Moon (which includes eating beans) to use past tenses, then they can explain what is going on in the video using present tenses and, finally, make predictions on what will happen next in the story.