Note: The full lesson with answers and audio are available in the paid subscriber section below.
This is another addition to a series of lessons focusing on contemporary issues. In fact, demographics is easily my favorite topic at the moment. Before I dived into it a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t realized how topical and how engaging it would be to myself and my students. And while I was developing teaching materials for a lesson, I kept learning more and more about the most important demographical issues of our time. Below are links to 3 brilliant podcasts from the last couple of weeks:
The News Agents
Is the world running out of babies?
The Ezra Klein Show The Deep Conflict Between our Work and Parenting Ideals
The Daily (NYT)
It sucks to be 33!
Demographics lesson
1. Brainstorm
The first exercise I did with my class started out looking like an ordinary brainstorm. But what you quickly realize is that when discussing demographics right now in 2024, everything is fascinatingly interconnected. This brainstorm with a university class was an explosion of ideas.
2. Demographics vocabulary
Introducing the vocabulary with images. It’s great. It’s fun.
3. Vocabulary reinforcement with multiple choice and critical thinking exercises
Eslflow’s Lesson Designer GPT was used to create a set of exercises about demographics and the target vocabulary. The GPT works well. However, it’s more of a sandbox for testing out exercise creation (teaching ideas). I’ve learnt to only use the exercises that seem most useful and to discard the others. In fact, I’m beginning to think that it’s better to have one GPT that specializes in one or two activities - then you can create a GPT that is more customizable, more sophisticated and more reliable. The exercises I chose for demographics included a multiple choice vocabulary exercise for reviewing vocabulary and 2 really neat critical thinking exercises.
a. Vocabulary
b. Critcal thinking
4. Listening exercises
The Dialogue Designer GPT was used to create a dialogue with Generation Z students talking about millennials and demographics using the target vocabulary. I also used an excerpt from \one of the podcasts above to create a separate listening exercise (included with subscriber downloads).
5. Personalized opinions with multiple choice options
The Personalized Opinion Creator GPT (featured in the last post) was used to create the following set of sentence starters for the target demographics vocabulary. For the first sentence, option A is “we are Gen AI”. Originally, this was not included as an option. However, in the classroom, it was just about the first thing a student wrote as a D option ….and my reaction, “Oh yeah, of course”. So it’s included. One of the problems with AI training is that it’s often a bit out of date. So you need to proofread, revise and test exercises.
6. Pronunciation
For the time being, I’ve settled on 2 exercises for the Pronunciation Lesson Designer GPT: “circle the word” and “highlight the syllable stress”. These exercises can be applied to any topic and (I find) are a nice way to end a class and focus on pronunciation a little bit.
Demographics circle the word pronunciation exercise.
Demographics highlight the syllable exercise.