Research on Girls' Education

Steps & Teacher Directions:

Draw students’ attention to lessons 1 and 2 of this Girls’ Ed unit – they learned vocab related to this topic from the first listening activity, they practiced listening for gist vs detail, how to use discourse markers in persuasive or opinion speech, and more.

Start the Kahoot game linked under "Materials."  Students should use their devices to join the game and will get a chance to review topics from lessons 1 and 2.

10 minutes

Steps & Teacher Directions:

Explain that intonation is a tool we can use to add emphasis or stress to a specific word(s) in a sentence or utterance. 

To explain this / provide a visual, compare sentences “I love you” and “I love you”.  Ask students what the purpose might be of the stressed “I” vs “you”. 

Then, have students come up with an everyday sentence and write it on the board (i.e: I eat pizza with pop every day.)  Underline each word, one at a time and discuss all the different meanings / implications this sentence could have with a new intonation. (i.e. I eat pizza with pop every day contrasts from somebody else doing it).

Practice with more sentences if students need more examples.

Use Teaching Pronunciation as a reference / for more examples.   

10 minutes

Steps & Teacher Directions:

After discussing intonation, play the YouTube video linked under “Materials” which discusses how to use “Phrases for Expressing an Opinion.”  Students already practiced with DMs useful for persuasion / expressing opinions in Lesson 2.  Now, they’ll learn a few more phrases, but they’ll also have a task while listening / watching the video.  Students should use the intonation practice worksheet (linked above) to follow along to the video, underlining the words with intonation in the opinion phrases.

After playing the video, discuss which words students underlined.  Ask them to share their answers and ask whether other students underlined different words.  If there’s confusion on which word was stressed, replay the video.

Then, discuss the importance of that intonation.  Repeat the phrases without intonation or with intonation in a different spot (i.e.: “I believe we should…” vs “I believe we should…”). Ask students how the meaning changes in those two sentences.  Encourage students to ask questions if intonation is still confusing. 

15 minutes

Steps & Teacher Directions:

Students will use the phrases from the intonation worksheet as they continue work on their projects and finally record their videos.  

Students should utilize opinion phrases and practice intonation throughout group work time (and in the videos themselves).  Encourage them to point out when their peers’ use expressions with intonation and to reflect on the effect.  Students can practice intonation and phrases like “I think we should add one more slide” or “What do you think looks better?” or “Do you think we need to add more pictures?”  

They also should aim to add intonation to their Adobe Spark videos.  Their videos should be a work in progress at this point, with some slides/text/images.  In this lesson, students will need to add the voice over (speaking) to their videos. (Depending on class size, time, student ages, teach access, etc… students may have been working on this video for homework in between lessons 2 and 3 as well).

While students are working in groups, circulate the classroom and check on their progress. They should be aware of how much time they have to finalize their videos. Listen for their use of expressions / intonation in group work and in their videos.  Praise students for effective communication and intonation as you hear it in their speech.

Once allotted time is up, instruct students to submit videos via Canvas, email, Drive, etc...

If classes are shorter than 90 mins or if students need more time to work on their videos, this lesson could end without the presentations of the videos and that could be done in a 4th lesson.

20 minutes (depending on class length)

Steps & Teacher Directions:

Now, students will get a chance to hear / watch their peers’ videos.

Pass out the Video Reactions sheets to each student (they should have enough for each video they watched – or they can be done electronically if students have devices).  Each student should write one response to each video – they can pick Q 1, 2, or 3 to answer for each video.  

1. What did you learn from watching this video?

2. Which of the group’s suggestions did you think was the most creative?

3. Where did you hear discourse markers, persuasive speech or intonation in the video?

These reactions can count as part of their project grade or serve as accountability or participation points.   

20-30 minutes (depending on class size; number of groups)

Steps & Teacher Directions:

Facilitate a whole class discussion about the 3 questions they responded to in their video responses.  Ask the whole class –

1.      Overall, what’s the most interesting thing you learned about girls’ education around the world?

2.     What was the best suggestion for solving the problem out of all the great suggestions in peers’ videos?

(When students answer these questions, remind them of the DMs, phrases of opinion, and intonation tools they can use to comment).

Thank each group for their work on the videos and for sharing them with the class, collect each students’ responses to the other videos, and close this lesson. 

10 minutes