The real Sherlock Holmes

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the fourth and last episode of the mini-series Sherlock Holmes's London) is a short documentary about Doctor Joseph Bell, the real man behind Sherlock Holmes. A single narrator explains that in 1877 a young student, Arthur Conan Doyle, was at university in Edinburgh, in Scotland, and wanted to be a doctor; one of his teachers was Doctor Joseph Bell, who looked at his patients very carefully, before they said a word. One day a man came in, and Doctor Bell told him that he was a soldier and that he was on the island of Barbados; the man was very surprised, because it was true. The narrator then looks closely at how Doctor Bell knew: the man kept his hat on inside, like a soldier, and he had an illness that people often caught in Barbados, in the Caribbean. Later, Conan Doyle became a writer and invented a detective who notices everything, Sherlock Holmes, and he wrote: "I thought of my old teacher, Joe Bell." It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the past simple and the present simple, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (patient, invented). The study topic is Sherlock Holmes's London, the real places and people behind an imaginary detective: here, the real man behind the detective.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the 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 (Can you guess things about people just by looking at them?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words student, hat, man and word, and be able to read years such as 1877. The pack's key words explain the new words (patient, soldier, illness, surprised, invent).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged reality-and-imagination (5e, "Le réel et l'imaginaire", Cycle 4). The episode targets CEFR level A2-.