Aim :  

In terms of subject matter:  to introduce the new topic ‘Leisure activities’, enrich students’ active vocabulary and improve their speaking skills;  

In therms of thinking: to practice identifying features of an element (hobby) and sorting elements on the basis of their features.

Materials: 

1)  video clips from www.youtube.com;

Knitting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eClB0RpGBlo

Collecting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ-NNgDjox8

Sky diving http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGiD7KxSdxM

2) list of hobbies and interests;

3) Description of a hobby.

 Tasks: 1) Warm-up- watching videos and discussing them; 2) reading and analysisng description of a hobby; 3)  developing a classification of hobbies  and interests; 4) developing description of a leisure activity orally and in a written form for a target audience. 

Legend: You are a tourism manager/travel agent who has to select the most suitable activities for different groups of people and to promote one of these activities to the whole group.

Procedure:

Warm-up: students are watching videos and expressing their attitudes towards hobbies and people, using particular adjectives and set expressions, written on the blackboard ( extraordinary, boring , etc; to be keen on sth., to be fond of sth, to be interested in sth., etc.).

Task 1- Students read one description of a hobby and try to dentify the main features, which can characterise any hobby or activity (price,  the level of safety,  availability, necessity to learn something new, etc.).

Task 2 -  Students receive a list of hobbies and interests and have to classify them into 5 or more categories, using certain criteria, and explain the choice of categories.

Task 3 – Students focus on the noun suffixes, identifing the main suffixes for hobbies and interests and reflecting on word wormation. Students are asked to group hobbies into 3 categories of words– developed from  1) nouns; 2) verbs and 3) adjectives.

Task 4 – Students are asked to choose the most appropriate leisure activities for 5-7 particular groups of people and describe each activity according to at least 3 features. Two groups of people are given as an example: 1) New Russians; 2) A newly married couple; 3) X; 4) Y;  5) Z; 6) …; 7)… Finally, students represent and promote the selected activities to each particular group of people.  The audience evaluates how perasuasive was each tourism manager.  

Learners’ response:  At the beginning, students had difficulties in sorting hobbies into categories (task 2 ). So, I had to give an example and say that some hobbies might be expensive or time consumimg. Finally, they did it, but they all had very different results and it took more time than I planned. In general, it was an interesting lesson for students and they said that they would like to do more similar tasks.

Teacher’ s role: I tried to minimise my interaction, but still had to help with some examples.

Reflection:  I think that I have reached my aims in in terms of subject matter, but I am not sure about  thinking.  

Tasks and materials – Firstly, I introduced a description of a hobby, so that my students could identify some features of this hobby using ENV model (where each hobby is an Element with particular Features (time consuming, expensive, etc.), besides these features have particular Values (very, a bit, quite important). Secondly, I gave them a list of hobbies and asked to think about as many features as they can and group hobbies taking into account their features.  I think that students need a special preparation for this task. For instance, it could be useful to demostrate how to sort elements beforehand, using a diffirent example , and only then to offer independent sorting. Sorting seems to be an easy activity, but if students are not experienced in it, or if there are a lot of X-factors, it can be too complex.