The following article by Lindsay Clandfield is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

Television's got talent

Is television losing its appeal among teenagers? While statistics in Europe suggest that the internet, mobile phones and other handheld devices are gaining in popularity, television remains one of the main sources of entertainment and free-time activities for young people. Here are a few ways to capitalise on this huge out-of-class resource within your lessons.

Ask students to work in groups and compile a top television moments list. Many people have these and enjoy talking about them. Make sure they have appropriate language for this, such as "The bit in ... when ..." (to give a recent example that went viral on the internet: "The bit in Britain's Got Talent when Susan Boyle sang ..."). Groups then compare their lists.

Find out which shows are the most popular with the class. According to BBC viewing statistics, young people love big dramas and American comedies. Many of the big American shows (Lost, House, Gossip Girl, Heroes) are broadcast all over the worlds. Episode summaries are available for free online (each of these shows has a whole section of Wikipaedia devoted to episode summaries). Make a copy of a summary from an episode from different seasons (or different episodes within the same season). Students have to read and put the episodes in the order that they appeared.

Continuing on the theme of episode summaries, you could ask students to write their own. This doesn't have to be long, here's an example from Lost Season 5: Kate, Sawyer and Juliet try to save Ben. Kate starts to tell the truth about the lie in order to keep Aaron from harm. Remind students that in this genre of writing it is more common to use the present simple.

Finally, the narrative twists and turns of many television series and reality TV shows mean that they provide a good context for practising conditionals. If you could be on a reality TV show, which would you choose? If you were Buffy in that situation what would you do? Or a variation of the question I'm constantly being asked on Facebook: if you were a Star Trek character, which one would you be?