TURN YOUR UNSEENS INTO AN INTERACTIVE START-UP CONTEST

Stepping away from the ‘good old unseens’ is no easy task. Join this presentation to learn about how to use a reading comprehension task as a basis for a mini-project involving all four CEFR skills.

In our start-up competition unit, Advanced 1 English students are assigned an unseen text – an abridged version of an academic article on the challenges that the Hebrew language poses to natural language processing (NLP) - in the flipped classroom model. The following synchronous session begins with a short listening activity defining NLP followed by an activity comparing and contrasting the issues that arise between the two text types. Students are then introduced to Tech Crunch’s Start-up Alley Conference which showcases the latest tech products and are challenged to come up with an idea for a start-up addressing the Hebrew-specific problems of NLP in groups of 2-3. They are given examples of NPL solutions to model their start-up on as well as a presentation structure and useful phrases to prepare their selling pitch. Following the presentations, the groups go to the stock market: through the 100 Dollar Method feature of Mentimeter. Each student has $100 dollars to distribute among the startups of their peers. The winner is the group which manages to recruit the largest amount of money. In a follow-up reflection, students report high levels of engagement, relevance, a personal connection to the topic and vocabulary learning.

While the unit is built on an engineering topic, the model is applicable to any field.