Deconstructing Inspirational Speeches
ESL Lesson PlansDeconstructing Inspirational Speeches

Deconstructing Inspirational Speeches

This ESL lesson plan helps C1/C2 learners refine their vocabulary, listening, and reading skills by analyzing the techniques used in inspirational speeches. Students explore rhetorical devices, discuss their effects, and evaluate examples through video and text analysis. Activities include filling in gaps with target phrases, crafting persuasive speeches, and identifying logical fallacies. The lesson emphasizes critical thinking and practical application of advanced language skills.

Skills

  • Can identify the attitude of each speaker in an animated discussion characterized by overlapping turns, digressions and colloquialisms that are delivered at a natural speed in accents that are familiar to the listener.
  • Has a good command of a very broad lexical repertoire including idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms; shows awareness of connotative levels of meaning.
Online Interactive
Based on CEFR
Fully Customizable
1

Comment on this quote by Stephen Hawking. What do you think he means?

How do you think speakers can create the illusion of knowledge'?
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, 
it is the illusion of knowledge."
- Stephen Hawking
Your answer:
2

Watch the video and answer the questions.

3

Skim the text and briefly summarize the information about the rhetoric devices that were not mentioned in the video.

4

Answer the questions below.

5

Explore some useful collocations from the text.

6

Fill in the blanks with the missing phrases

7

Prepare and make a speech.

8

Homework