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Be like Bill for grammar (and vocabulary) practice

The third person singular of the Present Simple tense is known to be particularly problematic for learners and when the "Be Like Bill" meme took social media by storm last week, I thought that it presents a wonderful opportunity to practise the problematic structure.

Background

If you don't know Be Like Bill, it works something like this: you see in your feed an image one of your Facebook friends has posted which looks like this.

You click on the image and after being redirected to the meme generator, you enter your name and gender, and the app generates a similar nonsensical story about you which always ends with "(Mike / Jane / Leo / Farouk) is smart. Be like (Mike / Jane / Leo / Farouk)"and has a stick figure sporting a bobble hat.

But what if you could get your students write their own "memes"?

Activity

Level: Elementary - Pre-intermediate (A2)

Focus: Writing

Aim: Practise affirmative and negative sentences in the Present Simple - 3rd person

Procedure

Vocabulary to pre-teach

You might want to clarify the meaning of these:

Meme - an image or catchphrase that spreads very quickly via the internet (cf. = go viral)

Stick figure or matchstick figure - a picture of a person with thin lines for arms/legs and a circle for the head

Bobble hat - a wool hat with a small round wool ball on top (sometimes referred to as "pompom")

Writing activity

Show / hand out a copy of a Be like Bill picture from the "official" Be like Bill Facebook page, for example, this one or the image above:

Ask students if they've seen similar images (memes) in their Facebook feed.

Provide a template on the board: 

(1) This is ...

(2) ... is __________________

(3) ...  _____s _____________ (affirmative statement)

(4) ...  doesn't _____________ (negative statement)

(5) ... is smart.

(6) Be like ...

Put students into pairs and ask them to write a meme about their partner.
Circulate and help students with the language, i.e. feed in appropriate lexis for students' memes.

Rules

(1) and (6) should always be the same
(3), (4) one should be an affirmative and the other a negative sentence
(5) "smart" can be substituted for another adjective, but I'd keep "smart" if you don't want your students to write nasty things about each other.

Lo-tech version

Students write it on a piece of paper and draw a stick man with a bobble hat.

After they've finished, hang the drawings on the walls, ask your students to walk around, read the texts and choose the best one.

Hi-tech version

On their smartphones (or other handheld devices), students to go to an online meme generator: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/Be-Like-Bill

Write the text in the text boxes. Click on "More options", then +Add Another Text Box (x2) so that you have a total of 6 text boxes.

Tech adjustments

• Change the colour of the boxes, so that the first one is black and the second one white (by default it's the other way around)
• Change "Font" to Arial and "Max font size" to 16
• Untick/uncheck "Use all caps"

• Tick/check "Enable drag&drop and resize"

Drag the boxes to arrange them in the right order (following the template)

Click on "Generate meme"

Make necessary adjustments or edits by clicking on "Change settings" at the bottom.

When you're happy with the result, you can save the image (right click + Save image as...) or use the Image HTML to embed it into a class blog.

Example

The activity is aimed at pre-intermediate students, but I've used it with an upper-intermediate class and was surprised at how many mistakes they'd made. This is one of the memes my students came up with:

This is Silvia
Silvia is learning English.
Silvia doesn't skip lessons.
Silvia thinks her English isn't good although we all know it's not true.
Silvia is modest.
Be like Silvia.

Lexical variation

To add some vocabulary to this otherwise purely grammar-practice activity (what's happened to you, Leo?!), provide the following pairs of collocations / phrases on the board or in a handout:

like his/her sister – argue over little things (with)

eat out - be a good cook 

have a real camera – take photos with a smartphone

look after his/her heath – eat junk food

take the bus - live close to the school

do homework – make up excuses (for)

play with his/her phone in class - listen to the teacher

Students have to write memes with the above prompts; they should decide which collocation will go into the affirmative and which one into the negative sentence, for example:

Mark lives close to the school.
Mark doesn't take the bus to school; he walks.
Mark is smart... etc


Hope your students have fun writing their own memes. If you can think of more pairs of collocations or phrases students can use as prompts, please add them in the comments below. Bear in mind the level though.

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