Russell Stannard offers two celebrity pairwork activities and the sites where you can find the information to produce them.
I have recently been doing some work in secondary schools in the UK. One of the things that struck me is that teachers today really try hard to work in the students’ contexts, teaching by talking about the lives of their favourite pop stars, movie stars or their families. The whole idea of personalisation is, of course, not new to ELT, but what is new is the use of the internet in this process. The internet allows both the teacher and the student access to up-to-date information that is very relevant to the students and their lives. I am going focus here on a few key websites where you can gather lots of useful information and quickly use it to make language activities.
1. Paired pop profiles
The Hello! magazine website has a section called ‘Profiles’. You will see it in the left-hand menu on the home page. Once you click on it, you will come to a page where you can select by initial a whole array of pop stars and celebrities. I took the information about Beyoncé Knowles and created a pairwork activity which is useful for practising both the past and the present. The students work in pairs. Before starting the activity, we went through the questions that had to be asked as a class; this was to make sure that everyone understood how to ask them in a grammatically correct way. In this particular example, the students each have half of the answers so that both get a chance to ask and answer questions, but you could also use information on two different stars and set it up so that each student in a pair asks questions about a different person.
2. Celebrity mix up
For my second activity, I did a search of the web for two pop stars in the UK, Gareth Gates and Will Young. I then printed out the information about them and selected bits from each biography. I mixed up the information in one large information sheet. We brainstormed information about the two stars as a class and then I gave the information sheet opposite to each pair of students. They had to read the information and decide if it referred to Gareth or Will. They wrote their answers in the second column. Finally, I put each pair with another pair and got them to compare their answers before checking with the class. This is a great way of getting the students to do lots of reading. This is just an example, but you can do this with any two or three pop stars or celebrities. In England this worked well as both stars are very popular, but elsewhere it may be better to use more international stars like Britney Spears or Madonna or use actors and actresses who are well-known throughout the world. The Hello! magazine website is a great starting point as it has profiles of most international stars.
Other sources
Here are some other useful sites, which provide the kind of information you can use for both the activities outlined above.
This is a great site, though poorly organised. Use the Categories part (for example select Pop stars) and then you will see a list of artists. Click on the star of your choice. Once you have reached their profile, look for the Biography button on the right. The biographies are quite detailed, but you can print them out, read them and select the parts you want to use.
This is an obvious site to go to for information about famous people. It has an enormous collection of biographies, though many are very detailed. The best way to navigate the system is to use the search facility.
http://musencfaith.bravepages. com/profiles.htm
This is a very easy site to get round. It just lists the limited number of profiles that it has and you can click on them and get straight to the information.
www.biography-center.com/m.html
This site has a useful search system and is well worth using.
www.rockhall.com/hof/ allinductees.asp
A rock ’n’ roll hall of fame, which has quite a lot of up-to-date information as well as historical facts.
A nice clear navigation system with an up-to-date list of celebrities that covers sports, movies, music, etc. The amount of information varies according to the star, but some profiles are very good.
Search tip
Most pop stars and celebrities have individual websites with lots of information. Obviously, the name of the pop star typed into a search engine will usually give you a good list, but to make the search more specific, add the words biography, profile or fact file after the name. Fact file often brings up very short and concise bits of information about people, which can easily be converted into games and activities.
Russell Stannard is a senior lecturer in ICT and multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He has an extensive publishing background in ELT and is currently working with BBC Worldwide on various CD ROMs, and with Macmillan Hong Kong on a primary course. He also teaches English and Spanish at Sutton Adult Education College, UK.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 31, 2004