Civil Unrest

The main goals of this ESL lesson plan are to:

• – use civil unrest as a thematic framework to explore complex social and political topics;
• – develop English language skills through vocabulary gap-fills, sentence rearrangement, dialogue practice, and reading comprehension;
• – watch an informative video about military deployment during protests and practice critical discussion abilities.

This C2-level lesson uses civil unrest as a thematic framework to develop students’ English language skills through diverse activities such as opinion discussions, vocabulary gap-fills, sentence rearrangement, and guided dialogue practice.

Warm-up 

Students discuss whether they agree or disagree with certain opinions and explain why.

Video 

Students watch an informative video titled “US military confirms 700 Marines deployed to Los Angeles as protests grow.” After viewing, they complete a matching exercise, connecting sentence beginnings with appropriate endings based on the video content.

Exercises 

Language skills are reinforced through various activities. Students complete the gaps in sentences with correct words. In the second exercise, they complete sentences so that they have a similar meanings to the original sentences. Finally, students read scenarios about civil unrest and identify the primary causes that led to them.

Writing

Together with the teacher, students create two dialogues between a community leader and a concerned citizen discussing civil unrest situations.

Reading 

Students read a text about civil unrest and answer questions about the text to test their reading comprehension.

Discussion 

The students rearrange the words to form questions, then answer them.