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Here I include another of my first lesson plans. I'm sorry the events there are
now history but the ideas can be useful =P
ADVANCED ENGLISH LESSON PLAN # 8
TOPIC: WORLD EVENTS by Oliver Alberto D'Carlo
Objective: At the end of the lesson, students will be able to discuss world events and
solutions to real problems using English.
Materials: -color paper –photocopies of the appendices –scissors –adhesive tape –glue
–tape recorder –CD
I. WARM-UP: “History Contest.” Using a set of questions, the teacher will measure the
students’ knowledge of historical events and characters in the world. These will be
divided into four categories: literature & arts, political history, invents/discoveries, and
miscellaneous. The class will be divided into two groups (though there could be more
depending on the size of the class), which will choose an original name. The groups will
take turns choosing a category and answering a question. If the answer is correct, the
group will get a point. The activity continues until all the questions are asked. The group
with more points wins.
QUESTIONS
Category A: Literature & Arts
1. Who plays Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone with the wind?
Vivian Leigh
2. Who was the famous painter who cut his ear?
Vincent Van Gogh
3 Who painted the Last Supper?
Leonardo Da Vinci
4. What American director shot the movie Born in July 4?
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Oliver Stone ( He also shot “JFK,” “Nixon,” and wrote the script for “Conan, the
Barbarian”)
Category B: Political History
1. What was the name of the political secret police during the Nazi regime?
The Gestapo
2. Who was the greatest leader in the Soviet Regime?
Lósiv Stalin (“stalin” means steel in Russian)
3. What president of El Salvador took his position by the time the Peace Agreements
were signed? Alfredo Cristiani
4. When was the North American Free Trade Agreement signed?
December 17, 1992 (though it started to work until January 1, 2004)
Category C: Invents/discoveries
1. Who invented the helicopter?
Leonardo Da Vinci
2. Who discovered that light moved as both waves and particles?
Albert Einstein
3. Where in El Salvador did the first printer start to function?
Texistepeque, Santa Ana (it was called “El Puntero Apuntado con Apuntes Breves”)
4. What is the name of the hypothetic substance in which scientists thought
electromagnetic particles traveled? Ether
Category D: Miscellaneous
1. What is the highest mountain in the world?
Mount Everest (8.848 m and around 29.03 feet above the sea level)
2. What drug comes from the plant Cannabis Sativa?
Marihuana (though known since 3000 b.C.E, it was used as a drug until the 1900’s)
[Link] can little chickens survive without eating one week after being born?
The yolk is still in their bellies.
4. What do you call the skrit-like garment worn in the Highlands?
The Kilt (Originally, the kilt was worn with nothing as an undergarment)
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II. PRESENTATION:
Before working with the reading, make a word splash with the seven words in italics.
Elicit their meaning. After that, the students can read silently trying to find the gist. Then,
they can take turns to read aloud. Discuss: How things can go in the future? Make
students relate their own feelings to the topic. So that students internalize the new
vocabulary, they could write some sentences of their own. [Look at appendix A]
The End User: Walkman in a Phone, a Voice for the Consumer
Sony will never be able to live down how it let its revolucionary Walkman products
miss the beat on digital music, thereby abdicating its reign over the innovation, design
and marketing of portable audio to Apple and its elegant iPod.
But while we weren’t looking, Sony Ericsson Communications, the company’s cell
phone joint venture and has reclaimed some of the old Sony shine in music.
Last year, the company, based in Sweden, sold about 60 million “music-enabled”
cell phones, 17 million of them branded as Walkman phones, bringing its Walkman total
to about 20 million since they first appeared at the end of 2005. The music phone total
for 2006 is just shy the total iPod sales since 2001, which are about 70 million.
The bottom line is robust as well: Sony Ericsson brought in almost €4 billion, or $5.2
billion, in the last quarter, and earned almost half a billion euros in net profit.
Besides Sony Ericsson’s association with the consumer electronics division of Sony,
based in Japan, its music phones have the advantage of corporate relationship with the
Sony BMG record label, said Martin Blomkvist, Sony Ericsson’s head of content
acquisition and partner management, in a recent interview.
One of the cell phone’s clever tricks is called TrackID: you can record a few
seconds of a song, via either the microphone or the built-in FM radio, and then with one
click send that clip to the online music database Gracenote, which identifies the track
and relays the information back to the phone.
4
“The main thing always for us is simple and intuitive,” Blomkvist said. “We don’t
have to concvince 18-to-30-year-olds that it is a good thing, combining music with the
phone. They’re tech-savvy; they know how to get the music from out there into the
phone.
“What we have to do is to convince the 31-to-35-year-olds that it is a good thing to
do.”
With an iPhone from Apple in the horizon, combining iPod and cell phone, is Sony
Ericsson ready for battle?
“We don’t talk about what other people do,” Blomkvist said, “but what we do say is
that new entrants in the market are always positive. It keeps us on our toes. We know
we have to be innovative to stay in front.”
That sets Sony Ericsson up for a slate of new product announcements scheduled
for Tuesday in London. “You can never stand still,” Blomkvist said.
Sony should know that if they do, they may go the way of the Walkman.
Retrieved from: [Link]
III. LANGUAGE NOTES:
-New vocabulary tends to be difficult to learn for some students; show them that context
can help them to guess the meaning and also to remember.
-Keep close track of your students’ pronunciation and fluency!
IV. PRACTICE
1. Two Sides: Is the influence of cell phones good or bad?
Procedure: prepare two sides of the classroom. One will be the ‘agree’ side and the
other the ‘disagree’ side (though it could be an ‘in between’ side if you want). You read
the following facts and opinions, and the students show their positions by standing in a
side. Ask students why they think the way they do.
1. Cell phones make people disconnect from their surroundings.
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2. Cell phones create as much addiction as drugs.
3. Cell phones make communications easier and faster.
4. Most people have lost the sense of what the right use of cell phones is.
5. Some parents feel good that they can keep track of their children’s whereabouts.
6. Cell phones have caused people to be more disrespectful at public places than
before.
7. Cell phones prove that technology goes its right way.
8. Cell phones have caused many people to forget what is more important.
9. Cell phones are indispensable in today’s world.
10. Cell phones are just another trick to get people’s money.
2. The North American Free Trade Agreement (reading discussion)
Before starting, you can ask what students know about NAFTA. In a raffle, each group
will get a piece of paper containing one paragraph. Next, a representative will tell their
classmates about the information. All other groups can share their opinions towards the
questions at the end of the paragraphs. [Look at appendix B]
1. NAFTA has been controversial since it was first proposed. Transnational
corporations have tended to support NAFTA in the belief that lower tariffs would
increase their profits. Labor unions in Canada and the United States have
opposed NAFTA for fear that jobs would move out of the country due to lower
labor costs in Mexico. some politicians have opposed free trade for fear that it will
turn countries, such as Canada, into permanent branch plant economies.
Farmers in Mexico have opposed and still oppose NAFTA because the heavy
agriculture subsiding for farmers in the United States has put a great deal of
downward pressure on Mexican agricultural prices, forcing many farmers out of
business. *Is it a good thing that El Salvador has been included to some extent in
CAFTA?
2. There’s a growing body of scholarship in fields such as American, Ethnic,
Chicano/a, and Globalization Studies that examines the proliferation of
“maquiladora” work along the U.S-Mexico border as a result of NAFTA, and the
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adverse effects it has produced in that region. For instance, human rights abuses
at the workplace and a predominantly gender-based workforce; i.e.,
overwhelmingly young women at work, has also spurred widespread sexual
violence against women in the border region. Many of these abuses occur at the
workplace itself; e.g, forced sterilization, routine menstruation checks, and body
searches deployed to police the reproductive capacities of Mexican women to
maximize the productivity of the labor force. Chicana feminist scholars such as
Rosalinda Fregoso or Alicia Gaspar de Alba link such policies and activities to a
phenomenon they call “feminicide” and often use this term to describe the wave
of murders of young women working in Ciudad Juarez. Many argue that the
economic policies of NAFTA both stem from and exacerbate inequality and
relationships of force shaped by racial, gendered, sexual, and economic
formations over time that have benefited elite groups while exploiting and
liquidating others. *Are “maquilas” a good thing here in El Salvador?
3. Other fears come from the effects NAFTA has had on Canadian law making. In
1996., MMT, a chemical additive that some studies had linked to nerve damage,
was brought into Canada by an American company. The Canadian federal
government banned the importation of the additive. the American company
brought a claim under NAFTA chapter 11 seeking US$201 million from the
Canadian provinces under the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). The American
company argued that the additive had not been conclusively linked to any health
dangers, and that the prohibition was damaging their company. Following a
finding that the ban was a violation of the AIT, the Canadian federal government
repealed the ban, and settled with the American company for US$13 million.
*Which way has NAFTA proved that rich countries are the only ones benefiting
from trade agreements?
4. Public opinion in Mexico, Canada, and the United States tends to be positive
toward NAFTA. A July 2004 survey conducted by CIDE and COMEXI in Mexico
showed that 64% of the Mexican public favored NAFTA. A Canadian poll
conducted in June 2003 by Ipsos Reid found that 70% of Canadians supported
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NAFTA, while only 26% were opposed. The Program on International Policy
Attitudes reported In January 2004 poll that a 47% of Americans thought NAFTA
has been a good to the United States, while 39% thought that it had been bad for
the country. Despite their support for NAFTA, the polls in Canada and Mexico
have tended to show that citizens see their own country as the loser in NAFTA,
and to see the United States as the winner. In the U.S., the public has viewed
Mexico as the winner and has been narrowly divided about whether the United
States is a winner or loser in NAFTA. *Why do you think the public opinion of the
countries participating is to consider that they are losers in the agreement?
Retrieved from: [Link]
3. Dictation: Vista arrives with limited fanfare. Less dominant Microsoft eases the
hoopla.
Follow the three-stage way of dictating. The first time, you read and the students listen.
The second time is for the students to write; and the third time is for the students to
check. It is a good thing that you read at a nornal speed the first and the last time. Also it
is better if you don’t repeat or indicate where punctuation goes. Check the words in
italics. Students could have trouble with them.
Twelve years ago, Microsoft introduced a new operating system, Windows 95, in a
frenzied global marketing blitz that was unlike anything the industry had ever seen. But
on January 30, shortly after midnight, when Microsoft put its latest successor, Vista, on
sale, there was considerably less hoopla.
The lights of the Empire State Building were not changed to hues of Microsoft red,
yellow and green. The lines at stores were much shorter.
In many ways, the change reflects how much Microsoft’s influence in the computer
technology marketplace has faded as the fortunes of rivals like Google and Apple have
grown. In 1995, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were barely out of
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college. Apple, meanwhile, was on the verge of thousands of job cuts amid rumors that
it was a takeover target. Microsoft was the industry’s feared and seemingly invincible top
dog.
Few doubt that Vista will help drive sales of PC’s and make Microsoft and others in
the business of high-tech products tens of billions of dollars this year. But analysts say
that the changing nature of computer sofware –as customers shift from buying programs
out of the box to paying for updates online and using free programs like Gmail over the
Internet—could make Vista the last big software debut of its kind.
“If there were a line, I would have been on there,” said Joe Torres Jr., a security
guard who bought Vista operating system Tuesday morning at a Best Buy store in
Manhattan.
In Europe, where concerns about whether Vista violates antitrust rules have cast a
pall over the software’s debut, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, marked
the ocassion with a low-key event in London at the British Library.
The legal Problems that Microsoft faces in Europe pose perhaps an even greater
challenge than Gmail or the iPod. The company faces fines of millions of dollars a day if
the European Commission determines, in essence, that Microsoft has impeded rivals by
making it difficult for them to design programs that work smoothly with Windows.
Gate’s appearance kicked off a four-day European tour that is to include stops in
France, Romania, and Scotland. But his presentation before 100 journalists was in
sharp contrast to the British release of Windows XP in 2001 at the Royal Festival Hall in
London and a guest list that topped 1,000.
Despite the lack of a buzz on the scale of what Microsoft was able to generate in
1995 and again in 2001, the company has said it expects sales of Vista to far surpass
those of previous Windows products. With sales of PC’s stronger than ever, there will be
no shortage of computers that need a software upgrade or that are being sold with Vista.
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The growing pool of computer owners is one of Microsoft’s biggest impediments.
The company no longer enjoys the dominance that it once did.
And computer users are shifting to Internet-based versions of the spreadsheet and
e-mail programs that have been Microsoft staples.
If the diedhard technofiles who lined up in Manhattan on Monday night were aware
of Microsoft’s troubles, they hardly showed it. Some gathered at a CompUSA store on
Fifth Avenue, which stayed opened until 2 a.m. so it could start selling Vista and the
companion upgrade of Microsoft’s main suite of applications, Office 2007, at midnight.
By the time the clock struck 12, about a hundred people were on hand
The store’s first Vista customer, Sable Fields, a broadcast journalist student at the
New School in Manhattan, smiled politely as she made her purchase, surrounded by
photographers, reporters, and bunches of balloons. “I’ll be up until 5 a.m. playing with it,”
she said.
By 12:40 a.m., most of the customers had gone.
Retrieved from: [Link]
4. A Song: War
War is one of Bob Marley’s songs. Its lyrics are based on a speech of Hailé Selassié I
(Ras Tafari Makkonen), the last emperor of Ethiopia*.
Play the song and ask students to figure out what it is about. Play it a second time, and
ask your students to draw whatever comes to their mind while the song plays. make
students decide which drawing is the most beautiful (regardless of meaning). Then, give
a copy of the lyrics to each student to follow while the song plays a third time. [Look at
appendix C]
A mini-discussion can be directed raising opinions about the following lines of the song:
1. Why do you think the title of the song is War?
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2. What can you say about the line, “Until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more
significance than the colour of his eyes, me say war”?
3. What does the singer mean when he says, “the dream of lasting peace: world
citizenship rule of international morality”?
4. What line of the song cocks your attention? Why?
*As a follow-up activity, the students can search for information about Hailé Selassié I
and his speech to the United Nations Congress.
5. Cocktail Party
Bring small cards containing names of world events. Each student will pick up a card.
They will go around the class finding who can talk about those world events. They will
try to find out as much information as they can. You can add extra information if the
students don’t know much about a certain event.
World Events
The fall of the Twin Towers
The earthquakes in El Salvador
The Pope’s death
Saddam Hussein’s death
V. WRAP-UP: “Score or Say”
You will need a paper ball, a basket (or anything in which your students can score), and
a series of questions, prizes and/or penalties. It is preferable if the ball is made up with
the questions, prizes/penalties.
Ask your students to line up and try to score. He or she who does not will have to
unwrap one piece of paper off the ball. S/he will do according to the piece of paper.
Depending on the large of the class, the students can have more than one chance.
Penalties can also be raised up by them.
These are some of the questions that can be used:
-What do you think about remittances?
-What can be done to solve the garbage problem?
-What would you say is the cause of the poor tourism rates?
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-What do you think of commerce piracy?
-What do you think of our change of currency?
-What do you think of events as the Telethon?
-Who would you say is the guilty part in the massacre of Apanteos?
-What do you think will happen if illegal residents in the US were sent back to their home
countries?
-Would it be a good idea that El Salvador turned into a new state of the US?
-Would it be a good idea that Náhuatl were taught at schools?
VI. HOMEWORK
Students can write a (250 word) essay about some important event in the country or the
world. It can be about the solution of a problem, the praise of signs of development, or
just an opinion on something going on. Depending on the large of the class, some
students may prefer to present orally.
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Appendix A
The End User: Walkman in a Phone, a Voice for the Consumer
Sony will never be able to live down how it let its revolucionary Walkman products miss the beat on
digital music, thereby abdicating its reign over the innovation, design and marketing of portable audio to
Apple and its elegant iPod.
But while we weren’t looking, Sony Ericsson Communications, the company’s cell phone joint
venture and has reclaimed some of the old Sony shine in music.
Last year, the company, based in Sweden, sold about 60 million “music-enabled” cell phones, 17
million of them branded as Walkman phones, bringing its Walkman total to about 20 million since they
first appeared at the end of 2005. The music phone total for 2006 is just shy the total iPod sales since
2001, which are about 70 million.
The bottom line is robust as well: Sony Ericsson brought in almost €4 billion, or $5.2 billion, in the last
quarter, and earned almost half a billion euros in net profit.
Besides Sony Ericsson’s association with the consumer electronics division of Sony, based in Japan,
its music phones have the advantage of corporate relationship with the Sony BMG record label, said
Martin Blomkvist, Sony Ericsson’s head of content acquisition and partner management, in a recent
interview.
One of the cell phone’s clever tricks is called TrackID: you can record a few seconds of a song, via
either the microphone or the built-in FM radio, and then with one click send that clip to the online music
database Gracenote, which identifies the track and relays the information back to the phone.
“The main thing always for us is simple and intuitive,” Blomkvist said. “We don’t have to concvince
18-to-30-year-olds that it is a good thing, combining music with the phone. They’re tech-savvy; they know
how to get the music from out there into the phone.
“What we have to do is to convince the 31-to-35-year-olds that it is a good thing to do.”
With an iPhone from Apple in the horizon, combining iPod and cell phone, is Sony Ericsson ready for
battle?
“We don’t talk about what other people do,” Blomkvist said, “but what we do say is that new entrants
in the market are always positive. It keeps us on our toes. We know we have to be innovative to stay in
front.”
That sets Sony Ericsson up for a slate of new product announcements scheduled for Tuesday in
London. “You can never stand still,” Blomkvist said.
Sony should know that if they do, they may go the way of the Walkman.
13
Appendix B
1. NAFTA has been controversial since it was first proposed. Transnational
corporations have tended to support NAFTA in the belief that lower tariffs would
increase their profits. Labor unions in Canada and the United States have
opposed NAFTA for fear that jobs would move out of the country due to lower
labor costs in Mexico. some politicians have opposed free trade for fear that it will
turn countries, such as Canada, into permanent branch plant economies.
Farmers in Mexico have opposed and still oppose NAFTA because the heavy
agriculture subsiding for farmers in the United States has put a great deal of
downward pressure on Mexican agricultural prices, forcing many farmers out of
business. *Is it a good thing that El Salvador has been included to some extent in
CAFTA?
2. There’s a growing body of scholarship in fields such as American, Ethnic,
Chicano/a, and Globalization Studies that examines the proliferation of
“maquiladora” work along the U.S-Mexico border as a result of NAFTA, and the
adverse effects it has produced in that region. For instance, human rights abuses
at the workplace and a predominantly gender-based workforce; i.e.,
overwhelmingly young women at work, has also spurred widespread sexual
violence against women in the border region. Many of these abuses occur at the
workplace itself; e.g, forced sterilization, routine menstruation checks, and body
searches deployed to police the reproductive capacities of Mexican women to
maximize the productivity of the labor force. Chicana feminist scholars such as
Rosalinda Fregoso or Alicia Gaspar de Alba link such policies and activities to a
phenomenon they call “feminicide” and often use this term to describe the wave
of murders of young women working in Ciudad Juarez. Many argue that the
economic policies of NAFTA both stem from and exacerbate inequality and
relationships of force shaped by racial, gendered, sexual, and economic
formations over time that have benefited elite groups while exploiting and
liquidating others. *Are “maquilas” a good thing here in El Salvador?
14
3. Other fears come from the effects NAFTA has had on Canadian law making. In
1996., MMT, a chemical additive that some studies had linked to nerve damage,
was brought into Canada by an American company. The Canadian federal
government banned the importation of the additive. the American company
brought a claim under NAFTA chapter 11 seeking US$201 million from the
Canadian provinces under the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). The American
company argued that the additive had not been conclusively linked to any health
dangers, and that the prohibition was damaging their company. Following a
finding that the ban was a violation of the AIT, the Canadian federal government
repealed the ban, and settled with the American company for US$13 million.
*Which way has NAFTA proved that rich countries are the only ones benefiting
from trade agreements?
4. Public opinion in Mexico, Canada, and the United States tends to be positive
toward NAFTA. A July 2004 survey conducted by CIDE and COMEXI in Mexico
showed that 64% of the Mexican public favored NAFTA. A Canadian poll
conducted in June 2003 by Ipsos Reid found that 70% of Canadians supported
NAFTA, while only 26% were opposed. The Program on International Policy
Attitudes reported In January 2004 poll that a 47% of Americans thought NAFTA
has been a good to the United States, while 39% thought that it had been bad for
the country. Despite their support for NAFTA, the polls in Canada and Mexico
have tended to show that citizens see their own country as the loser in NAFTA,
and to see the United States as the winner. In the U.S., the public has viewed
Mexico as the winner and has been narrowly divided about whether the United
States is a winner or loser in NAFTA. *Why do you think the public opinion of the
countries participating is to consider that they are losers in the agreement?
15
Appendix C
“War” “War”
Until the philosophy, which holds one race Until the philosophy, which holds one race
superior superior
and another inferior is finally and and another inferior is finally and
permanently permanently
discredited and abandoned, discredited and abandoned,
everywhere is war- me say war everywhere is war- me say war
That until there are no longer That until there are no longer
first class and second class citizens of any first class and second class citizens of any
nation nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin is of no Until the colour of a man’s skin is of no
more significance more significance
than the colour of his eyes, me say war than the colour of his eyes, me say war
That until the basic human rights That until the basic human rights
are equally guaranteed to all are equally guaranteed to all
without regard to race, uh- ‘tis a war without regard to race, uh- ‘tis a war
That until that day, That until that day,
the dream of lasting peace the dream of lasting peace
-world citizenship rule of international -world citizenship rule of international
morality- morality-
will remain in but a fleeting illusion will remain in but a fleeting illusion
to be pursued but never attained to be pursued but never attained
Now everywhere is war Now everywhere is war
War! War!
And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
that hold our brothers in Angola, in that hold our brothers in Angola, in
Mozambique, South Africa, Mozambique, South Africa,
sub-human bondage have been toppled, sub-human bondage have been toppled,
utterly destroyed, utterly destroyed,
well, everywhere is WAR- me say war well, everywhere is WAR- me say war
War in the East, War in the West War in the East, War in the West
War up North, War down South War up North, War down South
War, War, rumours of a war War, War, rumours of a war
And until that day, And until that day,
the African continent will not know peace the African continent will not know peace
We Africans will fight, we find it necessary We Africans will fight, we find it necessary
and we know we shall win and we know we shall win
as we are confident in the victory as we are confident in the victory
of Good over Evil of Good over Evil
Good over Evil, G’yeah Good over Evil, G’yeah
Good over Evil...(2x) Good over Evil...(2x)