Harry Potter's Britain: Christ Church, Oxford

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Harry Potter's Britain, one real place per episode) is a short documentary about the dining hall of Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford. A single narrator explains that the big hall of the Harry Potter films is a copy built in a film studio, while the old stairs to the real hall appear in the films. The narrator then tells the hall's other story, Alice in Wonderland, written by the maths teacher Charles Dodgson as Lewis Carroll, and shows a window of shields with Alice's face at the top and small figures from the book in the corners. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple (regular and irregular verbs, and was), there is and there are, the imperative look, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (dining hall, copy, figures).

Materials & prerequisites

The episode comes with its audio, slideshow and script. Each pack is a one-page PDF with the text, three pictures, the key words and the 10 questions: a pupil pack, and a teacher pack with the answers highlighted. It also has a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key. It has no lesson plan. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (Which story do you prefer: Harry Potter or Alice in Wonderland?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words school, teacher, film and book. Point out that a college here is part of a university, not a French collège. The pack's key words explain the new words (dining hall, college, student, copy, studio, stairs, famous, maths).

Curriculum alignment

Fits the 5e axis "Le réel et l'imaginaire" (the real and the imaginary, Cycle 4), tagged reality-and-imagination: a real place behind two famous stories. The episode targets CEFR level A2-.