travel | ESL Conversation Lessons

What are the top 5 vacations…just for you?

Are you ready for a vacation, but don’t know where to go? Have I got a fantastic tool for you. The Washington Post offers this wild vacation planner tool. All you have to do is answer their questions and the computer will generate the top vacation spots based on your answers.

Is that not an awesome ESL exercise! I was beyond tickled when I stumbled on this gem of a website. Not only is it super useful for the common mortal, but it is also a fantastic speaking, reading and conversation exercise.

The questions are interesting and the options are funny. You may need to help the students with some of the jokes and figurative language, but once they understand that they don’t really have to understand everything verbatim, they should have a good time.

The articles are well written, perhaps a little challenging at times, but include many pictures.

How I would Teach This

Get students in pairs. One person asks the questions and the other answers
Let the computer generate the results
Ask each student to choose an article, even if they are not the traveller. Each read and then do a Tell Back on the content.
Switch roles and repeat steps 1 to 3.

The article: Washing Post Vacation Finder

Let me know how it turns out.

Bon voyage

Top 7 Travel Destinations 2019

If you could go anywhere on vacation, no budget, no constraints, where would you go? Erik Conover is a filmmaker and traveler and he has used social media to help him discover new and little know traveling gems.

He challenged his YouTube followers to make suggestions for the most incredible travel destinations. From this list, he charts his course and reports his adventures on his YouTube channel.

The result is a super interesting video of incredible destinations that have definitely made it to my bucket list.

Warm-Up

-What are your top 7 travel destinations and why?

The Video: Top 7 INCREDIBLE Travel Destinations of 2019 by Erik Conover

Questions

Depending on the level of your students, you can either watch the whole thing in one shot or pause it after each country and to a quick Tell Back.

For each destination say:

What activities can you do there?
What foods can you eat?
What discoveries did you make?

Have you been to any of the destinations in the video?

Which destination would you choose?

Which destination would you not choose?

What museums would you recommend?

Why not indulged is some culture and beauty?

I love going to museums. They are like a breath of cultural air. Something about spending time with other people’s stories that inspires me.

Pre discussion

What type of museum do you enjoy (if at all…you can say you don’t like them…that’s ok too)?
What museums or exhibits have you been to that you would recommend?

The Article

Scan through this National Geographic article on the top 10 museums in the world and flesh out what makes each extraordinary.

Have you visited any of the museums on the list? What was it like?
Which museum would you visit?
What are some of the main attractions of each museum?
What type of museums do you like? Art? History? Science?
Do you have any memorable experiences at museums?

Where would you travel to?

If you could choose among National Geographic top 15 travel destinations, where would you go?

Scroll through the top 15 destinations suggested by National Geographic and say which you would choose and why (only read titles and look at pictures).

Go explore the picture of the chosen destination. What is happening? What is the weather like? Where are we, in the mountains, the city, the forest, etc? What do you like about it?

Now choose a destination you DON’T want to visit. Why? What is happening in the picture? Where are we? What is the weather like? What don’t you like about it.