Korean Job Discussion Forums

[earthbound14]

Alright I just got stuck with doing a Pop Culture English class for University students (low intermediate to high intermediate).

I have a few ideas, but not many.

Any ideas?
I will be happy to share what I have (when it is finished) if others share things with me.

So far I'm going to use some songs that I found in a previous post here.

I have a whole lecture with adjectives (multiple adjectives in order, comparisons and superlatives) with various pop cultural things. Pictures of rock bands, super heroes, a whole page of Bruce Lee vs Arnold, famous buildings, strange people, famous animals, and common internet humour.

There will be a Bruce Lee appreciation day, life and times of Bruce with a little Brandon Lee thrown in (The Crow).

Music discussion day (Kinds of music quiz with actual songs, what do you like? What concerts have you been too, why do you like.....)

Sports and hobbies class, with a focus on extreme sports, mostly snowboarding as most of my students seem to like it and we can talk about the different resorts in Korea and other cool activities to do in Korea. Again we can use the words should, and have with adjectives. We can talk about things they have done, wish to to and are planning to do. I have a bunch of youtube videos lined up for the students to talk about and get them interested.

idioms and slang class

konglish class

strange people class - tattoos, peircings and other extreme body mods (shock the students) - no grammar chosen yet

Describing people (hair, face, body, clothes) - famous stars. I have a game where students describe someone and other students must guess who it is.

What movie is it? Students read the summary of a movie with all the names blocked out and they must guess what movie it is. They also must write their own summary for the class. I also plan to do a movie portion where clips from the movie are played and they must guess.

Most of these are in the working stages, so I have my work cut out for me...I'm teaching it in two weeks.

[ajuma]

When you're teaching them to describe people, teach them words like airhead, idiot, outgoing, plump, laid-back, skanky, gross, disgusting, slob...and any other common descriptive words. Most students have only been taught the usual such as pretty, beautiful, handsome and cute....AND IT'S NOT CUTIE!!!!

[angel of bob]

OMG! I'm really jealous. I love kind of third rate American culture and would die to teach stuff like this.

My recommendation is to show a Spike Lee film like Do The Right Thing, because it really showcases urban life in America also has a lot of interesting looking stuff in it. Or Natural Born Killers! And then lots of dumb movies like PCU, Repo Man, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. And then more dumb stuff like Sex and the City and Law & Order! Totally overkill, but American movies and tv shows are like a mirror of popular hopes, dreams, and expectations.

Also, I taught out of this sort of weird Word Jazz conversational text book, and it had a real pop focus. Each chapter talked about housing culture, partying, work, university, stuff like that and had vocabulary list with slang and idioms, and a section comparing Korean cultural attitudes with American cultural attitudes. I taught it for an adult conversation class and had a lot of pretty interesting discussions. Obviously you wouldn't be able to teach the whole book, but I think it would be a great for ideas.

My third recommendation is "Singlish." My Japanese roomate in college took an ESL class where they listened to "Stairway to Heaven" and had discussions about popular songs like "Fight the Power" and "I wanna hold your hand." They also had lyrics sheets and would have to write paragraphs about their interpretation of "Stairway."

Hope this helps. Good luck!

[ddeubel]

That sounds like a great program - lots of variety.

I also do a similar Guess the celebrity game. Sheet full of names of celebrities and one student describes and the others guess. Cross the name off and choose another. Both Korean and World versions....

We have hundreds of videos in our A/V player and also Karaoke.at EFL Classroom 2.0 Not as great quality but also on our youtube channel.
http://ca.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=ddeubel

We also have a pretty cool community jukebox, hundreds of downloadable tunes...just upload and set up your own on our community. here's a sample.
http://poofka.ning.com/xn_graphics/musicapi.php?app=eflclassroom&s=0&b=100

DD
http://eflclassroom.ning.com

[earthbound14]