Viral trends: discussing fads and habits

Viral trends β€” a C1 English lesson. Practise using idiomatic expressions and expand vocabulary around fads, games, and daily routines.

Viral trends: discussing fads and habits
Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst / Unsplash

Summary

This ESL lesson for C1 English students explores Word games, viral trends. Using a real video as the basis for discussion, students develop reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar skills across a 90-minute class.

The grammar focus is Informal and Idiomatic Language. Key vocabulary includes cryptic (adjective), bragging (verb (gerund)), hooked (adjective) and more, all drawn directly from the source material. The practical English section gives students useful phrases for real-life situations: Explaining the rules of a game, how to use an app, or how to complete a task..

Activities

00:00 All across social media, cryptic colored cubes. And from Twitter users to celebrities, everyone seems to be bragging about their scores playing a game called Wordle.
00:08 Designed by a software engineer named Josh Wardle for his partner because she loved word games like the ones in the New York Times, Wordle.
00:16 Telling the New York Times soon friends and family were hooked, and within months over a quarter of a million people were trying to solve the Wordle of the day.
00:23 It's a roller coaster of emotions. Is it part of your daily routine now? Every morning, or if I stay up till midnight.
00:30 The layout is super simple. No app, just a website without ads or money-making gimmicks. Its explosive growth spread mostly by word of mouth feels like everyone's playing it.
00:39 For British fans of an old game show called Lingo, the five-letter word guessing might feel a little familiar. Playing P-L-A-I-N.
00:50 But in this game, no opening hints as you try to solve a five-letter word in six turns or less.
00:56 So let's say we try "stood." Ah, so see that yellow there? That tells us we got a couple letters right but in the wrong place.
01:03 Okay, so how about "dotes"? Well, the green means the letter O is in the right place.
01:08 How about "toads"? Now we've got two letters in the right place and we know there's an A somewhere.
01:14 How about T-O-D-A-Y? But in real life it is a lot tougher. Just ask the queen of Scrabble, my genius wife.
01:24 Okay, about this? No.
01:30 What if I don't get it? Then I am the moral champion of the house.
01:35 Could there still be another A in this word though? Haha, big spoiler alert, the answer is yes. Sometimes a letter is used twice, like in "banal."
01:44 Banal, is that your final answer? Yes.
01:49 Okay, but did you Google it? Yeah, I Googled a lot of words that were not words.
01:54 Tomorrow, no Googling.
01:56 Now one of the biggest things that keeps people coming back, it only lets you play once a day, which leaves you jonesing for so much more.
02:03 Guys, I guess I get it. Yeah, so wait, are you the world king of the house? I am right now.
02:10 Yeah, and I understand Al plays too. They say it's supposed to take 3 minutes. Takes way longer than that.
02:16 That's fun. I love it. All right, thank you. That's some good clean fun.
02:21 Hey, thanks for watching our YouTube channel. Find your favorite recipes, celebrity interviews, uplifting stories, shop our favorite deals and so much more with the Today app. Download it now.

Vocabulary focus

The vocabulary section introduces C1-level words and phrases related to Word games, viral trends. Key terms include cryptic (adjective), bragging (verb (gerund)), hooked (adjective), roller coaster of emotions (idiom), gimmicks (noun (plural)). Students practise using these terms in context through exercises drawn from the source material.

Grammar focus

This lesson focuses on Informal and Idiomatic Language. Spoken English, especially in informal contexts like this video, is full of idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs. An idiom is a phrase where the meaning isn't obvious from the individual words (e.

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