These materials below will help you to prepare for fluency building lessons on the topic: How Can You Change Peoples Opinions?
How to use the materials:
Firstly, look at the topic questions - we will start the lesson by answering these. Then look at the materials that I have chosen to help you to start building your vocabulary and ideas around the topic and to answer the questions. Each material has been given an approximate difficulty level to understand which will suit you best.
The main focus of individual lessons is to use the materials as the basis of natural conversation about the topic to give you the opportunity to really develop your speaking skills, identify missing vocabulary, correct grammatical and pronunciation errors and actively teach you skills that will bring your English forwards.
When using the materials, write down any new vocabulary that you think you would need to talk about the topic - Any new vocabulary can be learnt most effectively using Anki flashcards. If you find a lot of new vocabulary, set a limit to how much you want to learn and only learn what you think is most relevant for yourself. Also, make a note of any questions that you have about the language or grammar used in the materials to discuss together.
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How Can You Change Peoples Opinions?
Questions
What is a cognitive bias, and how do they impact on peoples understanding of their world around them?
What is the best way of changing peoples opinions? have you ever done this successfully?
How can we make sure that we are actually right, and not being affected ourselves by our own cognitive biases?
Materials
Tim Minchin, during one of his recent performances, made this brilliant speech about Confirmation Bias, which, although quite long, is well worth spending the time listening to and understanding ;
Psychology Today published an interesting article called 12 Common Biases That Affect How We Make Everyday Decisions that set's out some of the most common cognitive biases that affect us - how many of them can you recognise in real life situations and conversations that you have been in?
An article on the Conversation called Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don’t change minds gives us some of the scientific background that explains from a biological perspective why we might find it difficult to change our minds.
Over to you
Having thought about the topic questions to answer and looked through some of the materials you are ready to talk about this topic for some excellent speaking practice and to activate any new language you have learnt!
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