Hollywood

Objective & content

Two friends talk about Hollywood, the home of the movies, in Los Angeles. One explains and the other asks questions, on a trip with five stops: a small town with farms and orange trees about 1910, where movie makers from New York came for the sun and built big studios; the sign on the hill, which said Hollywoodland in 1923, as an advert for new houses, and lost its last four letters in 1949, each letter about fourteen meters tall; more than 2,700 pink stone stars on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard; hands and feet in the cement outside an old movie theater, a tradition that began when an actress stepped in the wet cement by mistake in 1927; and Oscars night, with the red carpet and a gold statue thirty-four centimeters tall that weighs almost four kilos. The grammar focus is present simple for Hollywood today (the sun shines, people take photos), with there is / there are, can, questions (How big are the letters?) and prepositions of place and time (on the hill, on the sidewalk, in 1923); the dated story is told in the past simple (came, built, said, stepped), for learners to recognise rather than produce. Learners listen for the five stops, the years and the numbers.

Materials & prerequisites

• Student sheet and teacher sheet, each as HTML and PDF (in the episode's printables folder).
• Prerequisites: present simple, there is / there are, can and saying years and big numbers in English.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c3-child-and-wider-environment and art-and-expression-of-feelings, so it fits cycle 3 (6e) and the 6e axis Art and expression of feelings. It also fits the media and film topics of German Klasse 6 and 7. The episode targets CEFR A1+.