LESSON PLAN FOR ENGLISH TEACHERSPET TALK
LinguaHouse
Apr. 15, 2022
Level: Upper-Intermediate (B2-C1)
Type of English: General English
Tags: Animals; Languages; Education, Teaching, and Learning; Behavior, Feelings and Emotions; 18+ Years Old; 16-18 Years Old; Article Based; Video Talk
Publication date: 04/15/2022
Students watch a video about a new trend: dogs using technology to communicate with their owners. This topic is followed up in more detail in a reading text. The lesson supports listening, reading, and speaking skills, as well as vocabulary development of word families with special relevance to word formation exercises on Cambridge exams. There is a choice of final activity: discussion questions or a structured debate which could be extended into an essay writing task for homework. An optional extension activity features a caption competition for funny pet photos (by Stephanie Hirschman).
- CLICK HERE to download the student’s worksheet in American English.
- CLICK HERE to download the student’s worksheet in British English.
- CLICK HERE to download the teacher’s lesson plan in American English.
- CLICK HERE to download the teacher’s lesson plan in British English.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Devine: Bunny is my one-year-old Sheepadoodle. (I’ve) had her in my life for just about a year. She’s a very thoughtful dog, talking constantly with her body language, with her expressions. My goal before bringing Bunny home was to have the most connected relationship possible with her, and that’s sort of the dream for us to be able to communicate with our animals in that way.
Button: “Hear.”
Devine: What do you hear? There’s a big barge going by.
Devine: Bunny has been using buttons to communicate with me since she was eight weeks old.
Button: “Mom, love you.”
Devine: Love you too!
Button: “What.”
Devine: What? That’s a bird.
Devine: We have different sentence parts. We’ve got people, places: outside, park, beach. Some of her favorite toys: piggy, ball, tug.
Button: “Hippo.”
Devine: You want to play hide the hippo?
Devine: So anytime I think about what she would want to be able to express, I try to add a button. There it is! Good girl.
Button: “Beach.”
Devine: Yeah, we’ll go to the beach soon, baby.
Devine: My sense is that it’s enriching for her, just another way to communicate, and to strengthen and deepen our bond. I’ve always sort of considered myself a hopeful skeptic. I don’t know enough to say that it is developing into language, but a lot of the experts that I’m talking to now are saying that it does seem to be receptive and expressive language.
Devine: I think a lot of it feels like ego, to be perfectly honest. We want to hear our dogs say things that we know they’re feeling or that we assume they’re feeling, but we want to hear it in our language. I would love for the greatest takeaway to be not that our dogs can talk, but that they’ve already been saying it all along and we just haven’t been listening.
Adapted from: https://www.linguahouse.com/esl-lesson-plans/general-english/pet-talk. Accessed on April 18, 2022. LinguaHouse.com © 2008 - 2022. All rights reserved.
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