Mind-mapping social encounters: a generic lesson plan

Just a short addition to the previous post in which I described how my B1-C1 students work on fluency by mining texts for related expressions, organizing them into mind maps and retelling the texts several times to different classmates.

I use a very similar procedure with my group of pre-intermediate 7 graders to help them remember functional expressions used in social encounters (and generally in ‘Conversation Strategies’/’Everyday English’ sections of coursebooks).

Image source: http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/obamashops.jpg

The general lesson plan is

• [gist] Students listen to a dialogue from the coursebook and answer gist questions
• [analysis] The teacher helps them to analyze what kind of expressions are present in the dialogue and sketches a mind map on the board; the students copy the mind map and use the transcript to find expressions in the dialogue to add to the mind map.
  Usually I try to set up the gist questions so as to guide the…