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Evil Company Lesson Plan - Lexis - Intermediate and up




        Evil Company 



Due to popular demand, here's the lesson plan for "Evil Company.' This is the same lesson plan we use as the lexis demo on The Language House TEFL certificate course.

This lesson can be used for regular EFL classes or for business English classes depending on what lexis you choose to activate.


Intro: Tell the class that you or your school is coming up with a new logo for the company and you'd like their input on which possible new logo the school should use. Show them a variety of logos from companies with a less than stellar reputation. Companies can include Walmart, McDonalds, Marlboro, BP... etc. The logos should elicit a negative response from the students, mainly 'unethical companies'. Play devil's advocate with them and question why they think these companies are unethical. Laugh at their responses in a condescending way.


Lead in: Demo these questions with students and then put them in groups. Make sure to monitor and error correct when needed.

1. Name two ethical and two unethical companies.
2. What makes them ethical or unethical?
3. Are companies or more less ethical than they were 50 years ago?
4. What are things 2 things that consumers can do to make companies more ethical?


Target Language: Elicit and CCQ the following

a logo
a slogan
headquarters
a good
a service
an employee
a customer
to hire
a perk
best-selling
a competitor
a goal
to face


Study 1: Strips 
put students into a pairs or groups of 3's and pass out a set up strips with the a target word on each one. Students, one at a time, will take a strip and give the definition of the word. The other students have to guess what the word it.

Study 2: Demo
Tell the class that you have a new company and they have to ask you questions about it. Have the following questions on a pre-made piece of flip chart paper. Make it visible for everyone to see.

1. What's the name, logo, slogan of your company?
2. Where are your headquarters located?
3. How many employees do you hire?
4. What perks do you offer them?
5. What goods/services to you produce?
6. What is your best selling product?
7. Who are your customers ?
8. Who are your competitors?
9. What challenges have your faced so far?
10. What are your goals for the future?

Have the students ask you these questions for practice and demo your own evil company out. I usually create a fake kidnapping company called 'Kidnappers R Us' or an evil diamond company called "Blood Diamonds International." The main idea is that the company should be evil, but not gross or perverted.


Study 2: Evil Company formation 
Students in pairs are given a sheet of paper and they create their own evil company. Monitor through the activity to make sure students are doing it right and using the target language. This is also a great time to practice their output with them. It helps to play upbeat music in the background during this.

Activation: Evil Company Conference
When the student have completed their companies, focus them. Tell them that they are at the 10th annual Evil Company convention. Their goals are to mingle with the other evil companies and find out as much as they can about the other companies as possible. They are also supposed to find ways to cooperate with the other companies to increase their world domination.
Play music in the background and let them mingle for some time. Yell out switch every 5 minutes or so to ensure that they interact with multiple different groups.
Break the activity and get feedback from different companies. Specifically focus on who they spoke to and which of the companies they would most like to work with.

Board erros, mention some positive things and end the lesson with a joke.

*This lesson is a lot of fun and can potentially be used for very long classes. Usually though, with this set up, it should take just about 60 minutes.  Other followups to the activation could be students creating a commercial for their company, doing a job fair, writing letters of complaint to another one of the other companies, or trying to destroying an enemy company with the help of others.
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