An Imaginary Holiday

It’s holiday season here in Turkey.  As a result, a large number of students and teachers take off for a month or more to various places. The vacation area of choice for most students is the Southwest coasts of Turkey on the Aegean or the Mediterranean. As a teacher here you quickly become familiar with places like Bodrum, Antalya, and Fethiye.

I just returned from my own holiday on the beach last night. It was my first holiday done in true Turkish fashion, which means a lot of R & R.

As teachers, we often get excited when our students come back from holiday because we think they’ll have some interesting stories to tell. In Turkey, you quickly find out that, by and large, this isn’t the case. When students are asked what they did on holiday, more often than not the reply is either “nothing” or “I slept.” When I first started teaching here, I thought that this was just a case of students not wanting to speak about their holidays in English. I later learned that they actually meant it.

Compared to many places in the US or Europe, Turkish people have to work really hard. They work longer hours and for between 2 to 10 times less what the person in the same job would make in another country. There are also a lot more stressors in general living here. So, for many, the ideal holiday is going somewhere where you can relax, forget about the hardships of life, and do as little as possible.

So what’s a poor teacher to do during the summer slump when everyone would rather be outside and there doesn’t seem to be much to talk about? Here is a nice task-based project on vacations (what’s a task you say? Check out this fabulous guest post by Marcos Benevides over at Six Things).

Level: Pre-Intermediate and Up

Objective:  Presentation Skills
                     Research Skills
                     Unreal structures with ”would”
                     Holiday Vocabulary                   

Materials: Some big, poster-sized paper, scissors, colored markers, access to a computer lab with Internet connection or travel magazines.

Procedure: This lesson can easily be modified to last over several class periods or cut down to just one.  For instance, you can do large skills focus lessons on researching or presenting.  It can also be adapted as a short presentation follow up to the Create a Country lesson.

Step 1)  Write “Dream Vacation” up on the board.  Give a student the board marker and have the class brainstorm words associated with that topic.

Step 2)  Looking at the board, ask if everyone seems to have the same idea about what a dream vacation is like.  Now tell the students that they are going to plan a dream vacation, but that they need to go on this vacation with a partner. Have them prepare some questions to ask people to determine if they have the same ideas about what a perfect vacation entails. (For example, Do you like adventurous vacations or quite ones? Would you prefer the beach or the mountains? Would you like to go abroad or stay in Turkey? Etc.)

Step 3)  Do a mingle where the class needs to discuss their ideas of a perfect vacation and decide who would be the best person in the class for them to go with.

Step 4)  Once they’ve found someone they think they’d like to travel with, have them sit down as a pair. Once everyone is finished, students need to explain who they chose for a partner and why. This is a good place to review agreement language as Turkish students tend to have trouble remembering this language point, especially in the negative. Encourage sentences like “Seda likes relaxing on the beach and so do I“, “Burak doesn’t like swimming and neither do I.” Correlative conjunctions also work (both…and, neither….nor, either…or).

Step 5)  Now write “Money is no object” on the board. Explain the meaning of the phrase if necessary. Tell students that they are going to imagine that money was no object and that they are going to plan an ideal vacation with their partner ( If the class has access to a computer lab with Internet, then they can choose anywhere. If not, they’ll be limited to destinations in the travel magazines). The catch is that the holiday has to be abroad and it can‘t be somewhere they‘ve already been. Making it outside the students’ own country facilitates the need for more research and makes it more likely that web sites will be in English.

With the class, brainstorm what they’ll have to plan.

-Where to go
-What to bring
-How long to stay
-Where to stay
-What sights to see
-What to do there
-How to travel
-What money to use
-Visa requirements
-Language issues
-Safety and health
-Etc.

Step 6)  Show students the poster paper. Explain that they will need to plan their ideal vacation and find out all the details by researching it. After researching it, they will have to draw out a map of their travel plan and include any relevant images. Students can cut out images from magazines, print them out, or draw them.  I usually give one to one and a half class periods to research and then prepare the poster.

Step 7)  The pairs then present the imaginary holiday to the class. Make sure to emphasize that this is not a real holiday and of course money is always a factor, so they will need to use a lot of 2nd conditional type structures. This is good practice for students as they often have trouble with this. They’ll often use unreal would for the first sentence and then revert back to present simple or something. This is also a good presentation project because students will have to switch back and forth between present simple for facts about things like visas and historical sights and unreal sentences for their plans.

I usually give the students 15-30 minutes to divide up who will talk about what, prepare the presentation, and practice it before they do it for real.  Also make it clear that each person in the pair will have to speak for half the time.  Before starting the presentations, it’s a good idea to collect the posters and split groups members up as they often will chat about the upcoming presentation rather than listen to the presenters.

During the presentation, listeners need to pay attention to fill out an focus form.  Also encourage them to ask questions at the end of the presentation.  The listening focus questions are here (FYI:  I’m having some problems with MS Office at the moment, so these are rtf files for now).  Note that the listening focus forms should be anonymous and then handed to the group who presented them.

Step 8 )  The final stage of the project involves reflection. The reflection form is here. Students should fill it out and then discuss it with a partner.  I usually tell the students to keep the reflection forms anonymous as well.

Step 9)  Take the forms home and go over them for the next day.  Discuss the feedback as a class, possibly presenting a selection of it on the board and go over any major language issues that came up.

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