Lesson Topics: Tim Burton's short film Vincent, individualism, parenting
Skill Focus: Listening, Reading, Speaking Vocabulary
Approximate Class Time: 1.75 hours
Lesson Plan Download: tim-burton-vincent-advanced-052023.docx
Lesson Overview:
- After warm-up activities, students preview comprehension questions and then watch the short (6-minute) animated film "Vincent" by Tim Burton. After a listen, recall, retell activity, students complete comprehension and follow-up questions.
- After watching the film, students complete a cloze activity with the film's transcript (poem). Later, they match key vocabulary to definitions. Afterward, they use vocabulary from the passage to create discussion questions.
- The final two speaking activities are a parenting role-play and an activity where parents consider how open-minded they should be toward a teenage child.
- The lesson ends with a review of collocations and discussion questions.
- Note that this could be a great lesson for Halloween.
ADVANCED (C1/C2) EFL Lesson Plan on Tim Burton’s ‘Vincent’
Warm-up Questions
- What kind of child were you when you were seven years old?
- What did you dream of becoming?
- What do you know about the works of Edgar Allen Poe or Tim Burton?
- Look at the word cloud below from the story. What do you think will happen in the story?
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-- Lesson plan on Tim Burton’s ‘Vincent’ was written by Matthew Barton of EnglishCurrent.com (copyright). ChatGPT was used to help brainstorm some ideas and discussion questions. 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. For questions, contact the author.
Comprehension question possible answers:
- …
- He’d rather share a home with spiders and bats. / he imagines dipping his aunt in wax. / He wants to create a zombie out of his dog./ He likes to read Poe. /He imagines he is suffering, possessed, tormented, and insane / He imagines he cannot leave the house / He imagines he’s Vincent Price.
- He did so to find the body of his imaginary wife.
- Vincent’s mother wants him to go outside and play like a normal boy. He fails to do so because he believes he is possessed by the house, and thereby unable to escape it.
- The film is colorless, in greyscale, and the lighting is dark. This contributes to the gloomy mood of the film and helps describe the character of Vincent, which Vincent portrays as dark and doomed.
- On a superficial level, the conflict in the story is an internal conflict between Vincent and himself (and his desire to be Vincent Price), though it could be argued that the conflict is purely in his own head and a product of a great imagination, and therefore, not truly a conflict at all.
Themes? Some themes could be individualism, conformity, and artistic expression.
Transcript answers: told, Price, bats, museum, zombie, fog, Edgar Allen Poe, pale, alive, bed, doom, room, day, weak, head, boy, fun, peak, grave, hands, screams, floor
Vocabulary answers: 1-banished, 2-tomb, 3-considerate, 4-limp, 5-isolation, 6-possessed, 7-shiver, 8-scrawl, 9-gruesome, 10-insane, 11-reflect, 12-tormented, 13-nevermore
Collocation answers 1-e, 2-h, 3-c, 4-a, 5-g, 6-b, 7-f, 8-d
Endnote: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_(1982_film)