Inside Out

e-lesson Week starting: 8th September 2008

1. Barack Obama
The subject of this week’s lesson is the man who has appeared on the front of
hundreds of newspapers and magazines in recent months, and who will be
representing the Democratic Party in the US presidential election: Barack Obama.
Level
Intermediate and above (equivalent to CEF level B1 and above)
How to use the lesson
1. Ask your students what they know about Barack Obama. Why do they think his
campaign to become president of the United States is generating so much interest
around the world?
2. Divide the students into pairs and give them five to ten minutes to read the text on
Worksheet A, encouraging them to look up new vocabulary. Tell them that in
Exercise 1 they are going to fill in the gaps with appropriate words. You could
suggest that they guess what the words might be.

3. When the time is up, hand out Worksheet B and give the students another five to
ten minutes to fill in the gaps using the correct words from the table in Exercise 1.
Make it clear that there is only one possible word to fill each gap, and that there are
four extra words which should not be used.

4. Check answers in open class.

Answers:
1. politicians 2. represent 3. age 4. speaker 5. foreign 6. election
7. current 8. studied 9. parts 10. lose 11. met 12. bad
Words that should not be used: politician, speak, made, strange

5. Keeping the students in their pairs, ask them to turn over their copies of Worksheet
A or to temporarily hand them back to you. Then move on to Exercise 2, in which the
students have to look at the ten excerpts from the text, decide whether they have been
written correctly, then ‘bet’ anything from 10 to 50 points on their guesses. In the first
column after the statements they should write C (correct) or I (incorrect). In the
second column they should write the number of points they are willing to bet on their
answer (10 points if they are forced to guess, going up to 50 if they are very confident
about the answer).
6. After the pairs have given their answers, it’s time to score. Each pair calls out their
answer and how many points they have bet. If they have answered correctly, students
enter their points in the final column (points won). If they have answered incorrectly,
they should enter their points in the third column (points lost). At the end, students
subtract the total of the third column from the total of the fourth column to give the
total number of points they have won. The pair with the most points wins.

This page has been downloaded from www.insideout.net.

It is photocopiable, but all copies must be complete pages. Copyright © Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008.
 Inside Out

Answers:
1. Correct.
2. Incorrect. ‘… he is much younger than most previous candidates…’
3. Incorrect. ‘… Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 …’
4. Incorrect. ‘He will be trying to beat John McCain …’
5. Incorrect. ‘Obama studied politics at Columbia University in New York City …’
6. Incorrect. ‘At the age of twenty-three he moved to Chicago …’
7. Correct.
8. Correct.
9. Incorrect. ‘… he is the first ever black candidate to represent one of the United
States’ two main political parties …’
10. Correct.

2. Related Websites
Send your students to these websites, or just take a look yourself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_7430000/newsid_7435600/7435687.stm
A BBC Newsround article from June 2008, asking ‘What’s the big deal about
Obama?’ Appropriate for intermediate level.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_7580000/newsid_7581700/7581724.stm
A recent Newsround article on the role of Obama and his family in the Democratic
Party’s recent national convention. Appropriate for intermediate level.

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
The official website of Obama’s presidential election campaign. Intermediate level
and above.

This page has been downloaded from www.insideout.net.

It is photocopiable, but all copies must be complete pages. Copyright © Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008.