Developing ideas at A Level via authentic resources: a model lesson

I haven't written much in a while, due to revision sessions, oral exams etc.. but the Year 11s have now gone and tomorrow will be the last lesson with my Year 13s! So, I thought I would post something on A Level, specifically for Y12. This is a model lesson which exemplifies how I use authentic resources to give ideas on a given topic to my students, which they can adopt to discuss a point of view and make clear reference to Spanish society. In this particular case, the lesson follows the Edexcel Syllabus and concentrates on the impact of Tourism on the environment. 

Students had already done some work on Tourism and the impact it can have on the environment. This lesson meant to consolidate those general ideas and blend them with a real case scenario: Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

The first activity was a metacognition and retrieval practice opportunity for students to self-reflect, on vocabulary and ideas that they could remember, without access to notes, from previous lessons. I wanted students to work individually for this activity and self-assess themselves!

Secondly, I explained that we were going to look at a case study, Benidorm, and showed the following super short, Tik-Tok video. We watched it three times and students just described what they could see and the contrast of the images:

For this, I expected students to use the vocabulary they had recalled in their metacognition exercise. This video is, in essence, a post GCSE photocard task, which all students should be able to react to and improvise some ideas on. Look at this post on how I exploit Tik-Tok videos, instead of photocards with Year 11s. 

The purpose of the lesson was to instil ideas into the students, to do that, I decided to use an adaptation of the following authentic blogpost, through listening. I made a short summary of the blogpost and identified unknown, interesting and idiomatic vocabulary in the text: click here for my summary.

I created a Tarsia activity with such vocabulary and students matched the Spanish to the English.

The lesson followed with a listening activity where the new vocabulary would be key! I did this as a Dictogloss activity: I read my adaptation/summary of the blogpost to the students, twice. They took notes in English and/or Spanish, then, in pairs they reconstructed the text in writing.

Why Dictogloss? 

By doing this activity, students practised the skill of sumarising a text from an audio source, part of the A Level Paper 1 exam. 

Similarly, they were listening to two very good points of view about Benidorm as a tourist resort: a negative point of view, accusing the city of destroying the Spanish coast and a positive point of view, which defends Benidorm as a model of sustainable tourism, thanks to its skyscrapers, which concentrates lots of tourists in a small space. 

Students had to listen to these contradictory points of view steal and use them in future lessons to exemplify their own views on the topic.  Similarly, Dictogloss, allows me to personalise an ordinary listening activity, as I could act the text while reading it! By reading the text to students, I could pause, go slowly or faster, as needed,  and use gesture together with eye contact to put the text ideas across! 

Finally, students reconstructed the text into Spanish. After 20 minutes, students were given the transcript so they could compare their written versions to the real text. To finish the lesson, we all summarised the positive and negative points about Benidorm as a tourist resort. 

Follow up

Students were given a direct link to the original post, much longer and complex than my summarised version, and a 5 minute authentic video from La Sexta talking about Benidorm. For homework, students had to read the authentic text, watch the 5 minute video, take notes and write a 250 essay on Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

In subsequent lessons, students can create presentations and, ultimately, they can debate on the topic.