What brings people closer – the things they love or hate? As it turns out someone has it all figured out and created a matchmaking app called Hater. Watch this B1-level interview and let your students decide if they find better connections through mutual likes or dislikes.
This lesson plan came to be when I was preparing a C1-level lesson using the English File Advanced 4th Edition by Oxford University Press, and I stumbled upon a class on this app. I realised that I liked the topic and the way the class starts, but I wasn’t a fan of the main portion of the class – convoluted and a bit boring reading. Of course, the reading part was there for a reason as it was later used to identify attitudes from a written text. The problem was that for my 1:1 lessons, the text was a bit too long and would slow down the pace of the class. For this reason, I searched for the Hater app on the Internet and found a short news interview with the creator of this matchmaking app. The way the interview was structured reminded me of the PET B1 Listening Part 4, so I thought I could incorporate this activity into my Hater B1 lesson.
You can find the presentation and the worksheet with the teacher’s notes at the end of the post, so feel free and scroll down!
The coursebook starts this reading activity with students eliciting three things that make a relationship work and analysing which things people in a successful relationship must mutually, for example, the same music, films, or politicians. I changed this activity slightly and thought that students could work in pairs and think of five things that bring people closer together. This could be anything, for example, hobbies, animals, friends, work, etc. Then in a good PET Speaking Part 3 fashion, they can discuss the topics and decide which of them is the most important in their relationships. Of course, not everyone has to be in a relationship, so in case you have some students who don’t have a significant other, you can ask them to think about any other relationship, such as any significant friendship.
The book then focuses on a sentence deciding what brings people closer – the things they love or hate. I went with Henry Rollins’s quote dealing with the same issue. Read the sentence and give students time to think if they agree or disagree with it. Elicit a few answers from some people and compare them with one another.
Nothing brings people together more than mutual hatred.
This is where I stepped away from the coursebook lesson plan. The book asks students to read two articles quickly and match them with the best title. Then the texts are read again to answer some questions about each person. I found a good and short video of the creator of the app, Brendan Alper, talking about the app. Look at three questions and watch the first part of the video titled Money Talks: Dating app Hater matchmaking haters (0:00 – 0:33) to find out more about the app, the way it works and the number of topics available on the platform. This activity should give students a better understanding of what they are going to deal with in the next part of the class. Finish this part by discussing if students think this is a good matchmaking app idea or not.
I was struggling with the listening for gist part of the class. I looked at many Cambridge exam preparation coursebooks, and they tend to skip this part and go directly to the listening for detail part, but I felt like it wouldn’t be too natural in this lesson. For this reason, using ChatGPT I created multiple-choice answers (A-C) with the missing questions. Students work in pairs and try to predict the missing questions. Play the recording (0:34 – 2:49) and check the missing questions. This activity gives also a good opportunity to understand the multiple-choice answers and clarify any vocabulary as needed.
Now that students are prepared, you can play the video again and choose one answer per question. Before checking the answers as a group, you can put students into pairs to compare their responses. If the task turns out to be more difficult than expected, you can also give them the transcript included in the teacher’s notes. Once again, the transcript was created with ChatGPT by asking it to remove the timestamps while keeping the structure of the text as an interview.
Since the whole class was based on listening about the things people hate, I thought it could be used to introduce or refresh the expressions of likes and dislikes. Look at the phrases and put them under the correct categories (love, like, dislike and hate). This part is important as in the next one students will need to use them to express their feelings about different light-hearted topics mentioned in another interview with Brendon Alper – A dating app you love to hate. This video isn’t used in a lesson.
Present students with a topic, for example, dirty bathrooms, and ask them to say how they feel about it. If you have this class in person, you can use signs from a game I talked about in First class – what can you do? called Four Corners. Introduce the topic, and ask students to pick up the sign that matches their beliefs. Ask each student to explain their choices. If you laminate the signs you can reuse them with different levels and lessons. In the case of online lessons, for example on Zoom, you could ask students to react by clicking the react buttons or doing a poll. Keep in mind that polls are anonymous, so it may be more difficult to get some students to discuss their opinions. Either way it can be a great conversation starter!
Finally, if you have some time left you could ask students to play one of my all-time favourite speaking games Don’t get me started. It’s easy to complain about the things we hate, but can you complain about the things which are generally loved by everyone, for instance, puppies or pizza? You can demonstrate this activity to show students what they need to do, for example, I just hate pizza! It’s always so cheesy. You don’t know if you should eat it with your hands or with a fork and a knife. Don’t get me started on all the exotic pizza variations, like a pizza with fruit on it! This game doesn’t have to make any logical sense. It only serves as a fun way of ending a lesson.
Have you ever heard about this app? Would you ever use it? Why (not)?
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