A Star is Born: a conversation lesson

Hi, everyone

I’ve been teaching a group of teachers since last year, and they are my only group at the moment (mostly of what I do is either teacher training or exam preparation).

The good thing is I really enjoy working with them, which means I pick the topics of the lessons carefully and try hard to make them interesting. I think this particular lesson hit the mark.

This is aimed at B2/C1 adult students, but you may be able to adapt it to both lower levels (by pre-teaching language from the text) or younger students (by changing the focus of the follow-up conversation questions)

The steps below are based on a presentation a PowerPoint you can download here on Dropbox or here on Google drive.

[Slide 1]

Show students the first slide and ask if they recognize the pictures. Elicit what they have in common (they have been nominated for the best picture oscar this year). Show the question and ask students to discuss it in pairs. After a few minutes elicit ideas and try to find out if anyone has already seen ‘A Star is Born’

[Slide 2]

Tell students they are going to watch a trailer of your favourite film for this year and ask them to guess which one is it. Play the trailer and then show questions on slide 2 for students to discuss. After a few minutes turn this into a whole group discussion and see how much students know about the film, in particular about the fact that Bradley Cooper really sang the songs.

[Slide 3]

Ask students if they think Bradley Cooper sang the songs himself in the film. You can also use Bohemian Rhapsody as an example. Tell students to read the text quickly and find out the answer. (Give them 20 seconds only). Let students compare answers before checking with the whole group.

After that, show students slide 3 with detailed questions. Give them more time to read the text and let them compare answers again before checking with the whole group. You can expand on this a little bit by asking students to justify their answers and show you evidence in the text of where the answers are.

You can find the original article here and my PDF version below.

Can Bradley Cooper Really Sing (ClassicFM)

[Slide 4]

Put students in trios or small groups. Show them follow-up questions and give students time to discuss them. After a few minutes turn this into a whole group discussion and ask students to justify their opinions.

If you have time, you may want to show them this behind the scenes video. Alternatively, you can have the song playing while students read the text.

 

[Slide 5]

Go back to the text and go over the pronunciation of the words in bold – You may want to focus on the catenation in ‘take off’ and ‘let up’ and the vowel sound in ‘gruff’ and final -ed sound in ‘untampered’

Get students to guess the meanings based on the context or give them definitions to match. After a few minutes, elicit their ideas and ask CCQs to double-check if students know what expressions mean.

[Slide 7]

In pairs, students answer conversation questions. Feel free to change the questions so that they are more suitable for your students.

Additionally you could ask students to create their own questions using these expressions.

Thanks for reading.