French: Talking about poverty in a beginner's course!

Poverty has existed since the beginning of time. I suggest that you talk about it in your EFL class with three great activities. Two speakings and one listening. Don’t panic! Even if this subject is not funny, you can talk about it in class because the way it is treated is not embarrassing. This FLE resource is available as a clickable and printable PDF and as an illustrated and animated PowerPoint.

Introduction to the topic of poverty.

First of all, you will have to answer some open questions about poverty, living standards and inequalities in certain areas. You can use this cool remote control that I use to scroll through the solids.

Then you will have to express yourself on the things that can raise a country in crisis. For example: “true or false?”, to get out of poverty the country needs more reading. Several areas will be proposed and the answers will be given orally and why not in a debate.

Listening: world poverty.

This is the listening they should use to answer the questions. This document should be used twice. It presents the evolution of poverty in the world since 1981 and the painful consequences of the COVID-19 on this evolution.

Finally, with this document, your students will also learn that the poverty line is not the same everywhere in the world, and that there is one for the extremely poor.

Explanatory live video from the street (sorry for the swear words).

***Speaking: “poor Jeff”. ***

Jeff is rich. His problem is that he is fed up and wants to test the life of the extremely poor by living on $1.90 a day. He will need your students’ advice about living in your town. Your students will have to fill in a grid to help Jeff get by.

Example of a sentence in the chart:

« Pour manger, je te conseille de… » la suite appartient à tes apprenants. Tu trouveras peut-être ça drôle.

Moi, j’ai eu le droit à : « pour manger :

…je te conseille de voler. »

…faire les courses dans les poubelles. »

…tu devrais te promener au McDonald et manger les restes. »

Etc.

That’s it for the presentation of this resource. If you want to go further, click here, you have a sheet about money. It’s really great!