Reading B1+: Is Your Dog Reading Your Mind?

Objective & content

A B1+ reading that asks a question pet owners love: is your dog reading your mind? The text opens with a bad day at school and a dog that comes to put its head on your knee, then looks at four real experiments. At Goldsmiths, University of London, most dogs went to a person who was pretending to cry, even a stranger. In Vienna, dogs learned to tell happy faces from angry ones. In Hungary, brain scans showed that dogs listen to our words and to our voice. In the USA, puppies only eight weeks old followed a pointing finger to find a treat. The answer is "not really": dogs can't know what we think, but they have become experts at reading our faces, voices and hands. By the end, pupils can follow a short popular-science text, find the results of each experiment, and explain a conclusion in their own words. It is part of the Reading B1+ set: six one-text readings with the same layout.

Pedagogical guide

The sheet has one text of about 380 words at B1+, with no sentence longer than 20 words, and a word box with six words explained in English (owner, stranger, pretend, scanner, treat, pay attention). The ten questions go from finding information to explaining it: three choices or true or false first, then "How do we know that the puppies understood the pointing finger?" and "The text says that dogs can't read our minds. So how do they know when we are sad?" The text uses the passive many times (was carried out, were tested, were shown, were trained, was hidden) and a little past perfect, so it works well after a lesson on the passive. In the speaking task, pupils tell a story about a pet they know; one sentence starter brings the passive back ("It was taught to ..."). Every experiment in the text is real and published. The tone is warm: no animal is hurt or upset.

Suggested procedure

1. (5 min) Warm-up: show the two photos and ask "What is the dog doing? Does it understand the girl? Have you got a pet?"
2. (10 min) Pupils read the text alone. They can use the word box.
3. (10 min) Pupils answer questions 1 to 10, then check in pairs. Correct together with the key; for 9 and 10, take two or three answers.
4. (10 to 15 min) Speaking task: in pairs, pupils tell a story about a pet they know (theirs, a friend's or their family's) that seemed to understand them, with the sentence starters. A few pairs tell the class.

Adaptations

[S] Go through the word box first, and give pupils a table to fill in while they read: country, what the dogs did, result. Pupils can answer questions 1 to 8 only.

[A] Pupils underline the passive sentences in the text and say who did the action. They can also invent a fifth experiment: what would they test, and how?

Materials & prerequisites

The sheet in colour or low ink (the low-ink version has no pictures), one copy per pupil: pages 1 and 2 are for pupils, page 3 is the answer key. A screen to show the photos for the warm-up. Pupils should know the past simple and have met the passive. Pupils without a pet can talk about a friend's or a neighbour's.