Great graphs for business English teaching

February 23rd, 2006
by Cleve

Via TED I came across Gapminder Human Development Trends 2005, a cool resource for teaching a wide range of language to adults (maybe kids too). The interactive graphs show various economic, demographic, and health related data, nicely presented.

But what really rocks is the interactivity - you can move sliders to cover trends year by year, historical and projected, from 1970 - 2015 (a great example of this is at the end of section 1).

So this could be a really useful class resouce for BE teachers, for two reasons:

+ With the slider you can focus on a wide range of language - you could target a variety of tenses (pasts, futures, “what has happened since”), verbs of increase and decrease, adjectives/adverbs to communicate degree of change (”dropped sharply”), and all the target language BE teachers know and love (?) when it comes to helping students explain graphs.

+ The subject matter is the human condition in all its inequality. The regional comparisons of poverty trends 1970-2015 bring into focus the gains of Asia, the mixed record of Latin America, and the tragedy of Africa. Adding in some photos from Flickr to connect the graph numbers with real people, and some quality discussions could develop, as students will exchange feelings and ideas about the human condition that the data (partly) represents. (Caveat: We’ve probably all had students get upset during discussions like this -I know I have- so tailor it to your individual situation.)

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