ESL Lesson Music Festivals

OBJECTIVE & OVERVIEW

This ESL lesson plan on music festivals contains activities, PDF worksheets, and digital materials for C1 advanced students. By the end of the lesson, students will understand and be able to use some useful idioms to talk about experiences, events, and festivals, as well as understand some of the hardships and risks involved with organizing big events like music festivals, from the perspective of both promoters and performers.

PREVIEW & DISCUSSION

This lesson on music festivals starts out by having students compare what can make a music festival both an attractive and disappointing experience for several groups of people involved in music festivals, including organizers, festival-goers, and performers or artists. Students then do some conversation and discussion questions about music festivals and talk about their experience with them, in addition to a range of other topics and questions. Students are introduced to some of the major music festivals around the world and further discuss what they know about each one. 

VIDEO & LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Students watch a video of a news report about the risky business of music festivals. They do a listening for gist activity in which they must list in order the topics they hear discussed in the video, and then proceed to answer some questions about these topics.

DISCUSSION & MUSIC FESTIVAL IDIOMS

After watching the video, students take part in some discussion questions about the video and the business of music festivals. They’ll then move on to a few vocabulary activities on some idiomatic expressions (idioms) that were used in the video and can relate to music festivals. This is followed by a second vocabulary activity in which students assess a man’s imaginary review of the Coachella music festival. In his review, he uses some idioms to describe the experience he had at Coacella. Students then relate their own experiences at events or festivals using these same idioms from both of these activities.

MUSIC FESTIVALS & EVENT INTERVIEW

In this activation, students choose a type of experience — it can be any kind of festival or event. They then participate in interviews in which they can choose to be interviewed from the perspective of an event organizer or an attendee of the event. They’ll get to use some of the idioms they learned in the context of the interview.

This lesson plan offers an engaging experience for advanced students interested in learning about and discussing music festivals in detail. The idioms provide the opportunity for students to learn some interesting and useful vocabulary in relation to and in the context of music festivals.

Benefits of using this ESL music festivals lesson plan:

Music festivals are exciting and dynamic events that many people love to attend, making them a fun topic for ESL students to discuss and learn about. It's a great topic to keep students engaged and motivated to learn, as well as share any experience they may have had or would like to have at music festivals. The lesson also includes a lot of fun idioms that can be used in the context of music festivals, or other events as well. Therefore, this lesson is great to use with advanced students to boost their vocabulary skills and develop rich languaeg to describe events and experiences.