Kidnapping in China & Guo Gangtang’s Story (Intermediate Lesson)

ESL/EFL Level: Intermediate (B1/B2)
Lesson Topics: child abduction, China
Skill Focus: Listening, Reading, Speaking, Vocabulary
Approximate Class Time: 1.75 hours
Lesson Plan Download: chinese-son-abduction-intermediate-062026.docx
Lesson Overview:

  • Students first warm up with a question about China and then try to guess the contents of a story based on a word cloud.
  • Next, students preview phrases from the video that contain key vocabulary, which they match to definitions.
  • Students watch the 2:31-minute video (BrE) twice, answering comprehension questions after each step. The video tells the story of a father's quest to find his abducted son, whom he last saw in 1997. After a long, hard journey lasting 24 years, the father is successfully reunited with his son thanks to a DNA-matching campaign by the Chinese authorities.
  • Next, students review seven more phrases from the video, matching key vocabulary to their corresponding definitions. This is followed by a sentence transformation exercise which requires students ask questions to each other using some of the new words.
  • The lesson has one roleplay scenario in which the son must decide whether to resume life with his biological parents or to stay with the parents who have raised him for the past 24 years. 
  • As a language focus, the lesson has a quick note on present perfect continuous with the preposition since.
  • For more extensive vocabulary review, students are presented with four images and asked to make sentences or a story describing them (using vocabulary from the lesson).
  • Afterward, students review how the vocabulary was used in the video, and then match collocations.
  • Finally, the lesson ends with a few final discussion questions.

A father driving across China to find his son.

INTERMEDIATE (B1/B2) Lesson on Guo Gangtang's Story 

  1. Would you like to live in China? Why or why not?
  2. Look at the word cloud on the right. Try to guess what the story from today’s lesson is about.

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This lesson plan was created by Matthew Barton of EnglishCurrent.com (copyright). Site members may photocopy and edit the file for their classes. Permission is not given to rebrand the lesson, redistribute it on another platform, or sell it as part of commercial course curriculum. Claude was used to generate answer keys and some famous quotations. For questions, contact the author.

 

Vocabulary Previewing: 1-c, 2-d, 3-c, 4-a

Comprehension Question Answer Key:

  1. Guo Gangtang / the father searching for his son.
  2. He was abducted/taken from outside his family home when he was two years old.
  3. He traveled more than 500,000 kilometers around China on his motorbike, carrying a flag with his son's photo.
  4. Through DNA testing — experts collected DNA samples and confirmed the match.
  5. 24 years.
  6. His story was made into a movie called Lost and Love, and he helped other families find their missing children.
  7. (Open-ended/speculative — possible answers: through information from the people who bought the child, through DNA databases, through Guo's detailed notes of tip-offs, or through the arrested individuals being connected to a wider trafficking network.)

More Vocabulary: a-confirmed, b-emotional, c-arrested, d-samples, e-give up, f-clues, g-refusing

Collocations: 1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-g, 5-e, 6-f, 7-c

 

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