The English Blog

Video: Football Shirt Sponsorship

This BBC video report looks at the challenges faced by football clubs who look to generate revenue from allowing firms to sponsor their shirts. The economic downturn means the pool of sponsorship money is getting smaller.

LESSON IDEA
This video would make a great introduction to the negotiation case study in Market Leader Upper-Intermediate Unit 4. If you haven't got that coursebook, you can organize your own negotiation simulation. Divide the class into groups representing sponsors or football clubs. The clubs have to negotiate a sponsorship deal with the companies. It will work better if you come up with some negotiating points beforehand (length of deal, value of deal, what's involved, etc.) 

LINKS
• FootballShirtCulture.com (news of sponsorship deals)

• Branding, sponsorship and commerce in football or pdf (University of Leicester) 

• Samsung claim Manchester United shirt sponsor talks (Telegraph)

New Zealand Couple Takes the Money and Runs

It's not often that New Zealand gets a mention on The English Blog, but here's a story from The Times which would make a good subject for a classroom discussion:

A New Zealand man who fled with his girlfriend after receiving millions of dollars in a banking error is described by friends as an unsuccessful businessman whose main aim was to get rich quick.

An international search is underway for Leo Gao, a Korean national, and his girlfriend Cara Young, a New Zealander, who disappeared two weeks ago after finding their bank account had mistakenly been credited with $NZ10 million (£4 million).

It is understood the couple, who ran a failing service station in Rotorua, on North Island, had applied to Westpac Bank for a $NZ100,000 loan but were given ten times that amount instead.

The young couple, who are in their mid-twenties, told friends they were going on holiday but instead withdrew at least $NZ3.8 million and left the country. Full story >>

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• What would you do if your bank accidentally put £4m in your bank account?

• Assuming you decided to keep the money, how would you organize your 'escape'?

• What would be an appropriate punishment when they are caught?

• What should the Westpac Bank do?

• 'Best of luck to them', wrote one blogger. Do you agree?  

• 'It's the bank's own fault and it deserves to lose the money.' Do you agree?

FURTHER READING
• What would Robin Hood do? (Guardian)

• Bank hits back at millionaire runaways (New Zealand Herald—with video)
• Would you return $10m accidentally put into your account? (NZ Herald Readers' Views)

LESSON PLAN

• Breaking News English has a whole lesson based on this story.

VIDEO

Picture of the Day: A Rolls-Royce In Tesco

Sky News reports that a motorist has been arrested on suspicion of drink driving and attempted murder after his Rolls-Royce crashed through a Tesco supermarket window.

• You can see more pictures here.

COMMENT
The car's registration number was A 501 VEG. 'Veg' is an abbreviation for 'vegetables'—very appropriate for a supermarket. And you can also find rolls (the edible type) in a supermarket.

LESSON IDEAS
1. Show students the picture and get them to speculate about what happened.

2. Get students to act out interviews between the police and the driver, a reporter and the supermarket manager, a reporter and a shopper, etc.

3. Get students to write an article about the incident.

The Burger Pilgrimage Trip

From Sky News:

The world's first burger pilgrimage has been announced allowing 'food tourists' to pay homage to the humble fast-food.

The itinerary takes in 16 cities in eight countries that are deemed to have played a pivotal role in the evolution of the burger.

The Burger Pilgrimage Trip, cooked up by fast-food giant Burger King, will take 35 days to complete and cost a whopping £3,400.

It is aimed at the rapidly growing number of 'food tourists'. Full story >>

For more on this story, visit Burger King's Burger Pilgrimage site, which has a history of the burger and a detailed itinerary. To book a place on this mouth-watering adventure visit the STA Travel website.

LESSON IDEA
Get your students to plan an itinerary for another 'pilgrimage trip'. This could be for a food or drink item, or any well-known product. This would make a good subject for project work involving research and presentation of results.

Mr Men Book Covers Lesson Plan

Jamie Keddie has a great lesson plan for teaching adjectives ending in -y based on the covers of Mr Men books. Which Mr Man (Mr Men?) do you think this is? 

Visit Jamie's site to find out.

COMMENT
I used to read the Mr Men (and Little Miss) books to my children when they were young. In those pre-internet days, parents did things like that. Now kids can watch videos and play games on the Mr Men website while Mummy and Daddy update their Facebook accounts.

TEACHING IDEA
There are dozens of characters in the Mr Men and Little Miss series with names not ending in -y (Mr Forgetful, Mr Clever, Mr Chatterbox, Little Miss Stubborn, etc.) These could also be used for teaching adjectives describing character.

British Council TeachingEnglish

The British Council's award-winning TeachingEnglish site brings together everything busy teachers need, from classroom materials to ideas for development.

The site is divided into four main sections:

THINK: where you can find teachers' articles on different aspects of teaching, from classroom practice to learning theory

TRY: where you can find lesson plans, quizzes, ideas for activities and other materials which you can download to use in class

TALK: where you can keep you own personal blog, join discussion forums and and form groups around particular areas of interest.

TRANSFORM: where teachers can can get help and advice on their professional development (training, qualifications, personal development, specialist areas, etc.). 

The materials on this site are designed for non-native speaker teachers of English working predominantly in secondary education in state schools around the world. However, the wide variety of material available will also be of interest to teachers of all age groups and working in other kinds of teaching institutions.

COMMENT
Without doubt one of the best ELT resource sites. The teaching materials are particularly good. Check out this advertisement storyboard lesson plan, for example.

France Eats and Sleeps the Most, Says OECD Study

From MailOnline

Their reputation for good living is legendary. But now the French may get a name for simply being lazy.

The leisure-lovers sleep as much as nine hours a night - more than any other nation in the world. 

This is at least half-an-hour more than the average Briton, and more than an hour longer than the average Japanese and Korean. 

And when they do finally get out of bed, the French will spend up to two hours a day sitting down to eat, according to figures released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) - which is based in Paris. 

Again, this is more than any other country, at least half-an-hour more than the average Briton, and a full hour more than the average Mexican. Full story >>

COMMENT

You can read more about the OECD study here. I may have lived in France for over 25 years, but I haven't picked up French sleeping and eating habits. I ususally have 'un sandwich' for lunch, and very rarely sleep more than 8 hours!

Print Ad: Travelling Fruits Cause Pollution

I came across this print ad on Adsoftheworld.com and thought it would make a great discussion starter. It's part of a series of three (there's also a pineapple one and a coconut one).

The caption in the bottom right hand corner reads 'Think global. Eat local'. BUND is the German branch of Friends of the Earth International.

The ad is designed to make people aware of the environmental costs of transporting foodstuffs around the world. For more information on this topic just Google 'food miles'. The term 'food miles' refers to the distance food travels from where it is grown to where it is ultimately purchased or consumed by the end user. Many environmental groups believe that the more food miles that attach to a given food, the less sustainable and the less environmentally desirable that food is (though things may not be quite so clear cut).

LESSON IDEA
Organize a debate on the following topic: 'We should eat local produce to save the planet'. Ask students to research arguments for and against.

Cartoon: Sunny Bank Hols

This cartoon by Tom Johnston in The Sun shows a typical beach scene—except that all the people are wearing masks as protection against swine flu. The joke is that the man who has removed his mask has a white area where the mask covered his face—the rest of his face has been tanned by the sun.

VOCABULARY
1. The newspaper headline says SUNNY BANK HOLS. 'Hols' is an abbreviation of 'holidays'. Monday is the May Day bank holiday in Britain so this is a 'bank holiday weekend'. 

2. A bank holiday is a public holiday in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Not every public holiday is a bank holiday (Good Friday and Christmas Day, for example). Bank holidays always fall on a Monday in the UK. In France, it's the actual date which matters. So when May 1st falls on a Saturday or Sunday, which will already be a day off for many people, most workers lose a day's holiday. For more on bank holidays see this Wikipedia article.

LESSON IDEA
Show the cartoon to students and give them 5 minutes to note down as much vocabulary as possible relating to the picture. This could be done in groups. Here are the words I came up with: beach, ice-cream, sunbathe, sunbather, (sun)tan, to get a tan, sunburn, sand, beachball, hat, cliffs, sea, bikini, towel, swimming costume, sun, sunshine, sunny, newspaper, can, pebble, drink, wave, blonde, sunshade, etc. 

The Susan Boyle Lesson Plan

Amy Bowllan, a blogger for School Library Journal, has created a Susan Boyle lesson plan based on the Good Morning America clip below. Here's the first part:

List three adjectives that describe Susan Boyle's looks and three that describe Diane Sawyer's looks. What are some snap, generalizations one could make about these two women. Create a chart comparing and contrasting the two. Full lesson plan >>

COMMENTS
1. Looks certainly aren't everything. Susan Boyle comes across as natural and unaffected compared with the excruciatingly patronising host, Diane Sawyer (is she always this embarassing?). 

2. An interesting lexical point concerns Susan's use of the word 'gobsmacked', which Sawyer 'translates' as 'bowled over'. Michael Quinion has an interesting article on the origin of the word 'gobsmacked'.

FOOTNOTE
Kalinago English also has an excellent Susan Boyle video lesson.

The Speaking Cyclist: Personalised Speaking Practice

If, like me, you think that most ELT coursebooks are unimaginative, boring and a waste of time, you may be interested in The Speaking Cyclist (nice pun) a new blog created by Mark Lloyd, Director of Studies at WELS Bath. 

Speaking Cycles are "structured free speaking activities which follow a specific framework aimed at maximizing the attention of students, whether in the role of listeners or speakers." You can read more about the rationale and procedure here.  

To paraphrase Mark, if you are a time-stretched teacher with no time to put together lesson plans or to source material, Speaking Cycles are the perfect solution.

Movie Lesson: The Pursuit of Happyness

My students have to do a job interview next week as part of their final assessment. To help prepare them for that, I showed them a scene from the movie The Pursuit of Happyness and then got them to do a pairwork activity. I've got the DVD, so I was able to show the clip with English subtitles. Unfortunately, the only version I could find online has Chinese (?) subtitles. You can download the English transcript, a questionnaire and the English-French glossary here, and the pairwork activity here. 

COMMENT
Other movies which have good interview scenes include Wall Street (Bud Fox's first meeting with Gordon Gecko), The Devil Wears Prada (more of a non-interview, but quite funny), and The Secret of My Success (with Michael J. Fox). If you know of any others, please leave a comment.

Playmobil takes legal action against toy Bible

The Daily Telegraph reports that a German pastor who sought to teach children the Easter message by fashioning bibilical scenes out of specially adapted Playmobil figures has been ordered by the toy maker to dismantle his creations. Full story >>

Click on the image below to see a picture gallery of the Playmobil Bible.

COMMENTS
This story is dated April 1st, but I don't think it's an April Fool. This would make an interesting business English case study. Are Playmobil over-reacting? Don't they risk losing the sympathy of religious customers? You could get the students to role play the Playmobil board meeting.

• Visit the Playmobil Bible site (in German)

While we're on the subject of Playmobil, you might like to check out The Register's wonderful news stories in Playmobil. Some of the pix are hilarious. Don't miss Facebook the Movie:

April Fool!

 

Here's a round-up of April Fool's Day stories from the British press:

• Swimming fish could be key to generating electricity for UK homes (Telegraph)
• Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink (Guardian)
• The Invisible Car (Express—my favourite)
• Queen Nefertiti's facelift (Independent—very elaborate)
• Travel Hoaxes (Telegraph) 
• Corporate Hoaxes (Telegraph) 
• April Fool's Day computer virus could cause internet chaos today (Telegraph—this one's true!)
• 10 stories that could be April Fools... but aren't (BBC News)

LESSON IDEA
Get your students to write a spoof article on the Newspaper Clipping Generator. The result should be something like this:

Six Word Memoirs

 

Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” 

Starting in 2006, SMITH Magazine asked its readers for their own six-word memoirs. The results have been published in two books which you can look inside on Amazon here and here. This video presents some memoirs from the latest book.

Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak from SMITHmag on Vimeo.

LESSON IDEAS
1. Get your students to expand a six-word memoir into a longer story.
2. Get students to write their own six-word memoirs.
3. Take a selection of memoirs and jumble up the words. Students have to put words in correct order.