Lesson Plan for Teachers
Review course lesson 3
This lesson aims to introduce written reviews of products. Students will read a variety of reviews of products online, and look in detail at the kinds of language that is used by writers to express their opinion.
Task 1 Product review survey
Purpose: To activate and share knowledge of product reviews.
Background: Students may already have used product reviews in their online shopping experience, though most likely in their L1.
Procedure:
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In small groups, students discuss the questions in Task 1
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Once students have completed their tasks, ask them to write their favoured review platforms on the board. In plenary, discuss which review platforms are ‘best’ in terms of the following (or other) criteria:
- most popular
- easiest to access
- most informative
Material: Lesson 3 Task 1 handout
Timing: 20 minutes
Task 2: Positive and negative language
Purpose: To identify and explore sentiment though identifying the connotation of individual lexical items.
Background: Reviewers can convey sentiment through their language choice.
Procedure:
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Hand out Task 2, students read two reviews and decide which has a high rating (five star) and which a lower rating (three star).
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In groups, students identify words or phrases they think indicate the author’s response to the product.
Feedback: Focus attention on individual words such as ‘heavy’ and ‘powerful’ for a discussion on connotation.
Material: Lesson 3 Task 2 handout
Timing: 15 minutes
Task 3: Conducting a sentiment analysis
Purpose: Students use a sentiment analyser, and identify words that may affect the score.
Background: Sentiment analysers give a quick overview of the emotional tone of a text. An analysis of sentiment can give students some idea of the match between the text and the star rating. A number of sentiment analysers are available: https://www.danielsoper.com/sentimentanalysis/default.aspx or https://www.uclassify.com/browse/uclassify/sentiment?input=Text
Procedure:
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Working alone, students paste the text (see Task sheet 3) from a football review into each of the sentiment analysers and compare the scores.
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In groups, students discuss differences in the sentiment scores from the different analysers and identify words that might produce the sentiment score.
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Encourage students to experiment with the analysers by adding negative (or positive) words into the text and run a new analysis. For example, an interesting result emerges by adding the word ‘bad’ as the last word in the review.
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(Optional) Students each give a park (or other place) to their group to find out about by looking in Google maps (rating, number of reviews etc.)
Feedback: Elicit words with possible positive (good, responsive, quality, amazing) and negative (downside, complain) sentiment. Discuss why these negative words have little effect on the sentiment score.
Material: Lesson 3 Task 3 handout
Timing: 30 minutes.
Task 4: Kinds of product reviews
Purpose: Students identify three (or more) kinds of product reviews.
Background information: Readers of reviews can find a variety of reviews – professional and user reviews, and detailed reviews of individual products or comparisons between products.
Activity stages:
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In small groups, students read three reviews at the URLs (see Task 4) and answer the questions.
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Students guess what is being reviewed in Task 4 handout, and then find a similar review to share with their group.
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Feedback: The first is an in-depth review, the second a user-review, and the last a comparison between two rival products. There are differences in length, sentiment and the level of detail about the product. Ask students for additional comments based on the three reviews. Kinds of topics identifiable in the reviews are descriptions of the product (in reviews 1 and 3), customer (dis)satisfaction (in review 2), recommendations for potential buyers (especially in review 3). It might be useful to discuss why the reviews are most often in the present tense, but the negative review is in the past simple.
Option: If students cannot find their own reviews, offer them Task 5 with reviews of pencils for analysis
Material: Lesson 3 Task 4 handout, Task 5 handout
Timing: 40 minutes