This got the Bookseller Award for the strangest book title of the year. According to the BBC article it is;
"For everyone who has ever seen an abandoned supermarket trolley and wondered how it got there, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America is an indispensable guide."
So this got me thinking about how we could turn this strange story into a teaching idea for advanced EFL/ESL learners.
Lesson plan
1 Write these book titles on the board (by the way they are all real);
-The Joy of Chickens
-American Bottom Archaeology
-Versailles: The View From Sweden
-Re-using Old Graves
-Highlights in the History of Concrete
-Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
2 Now deal with any vocabulary problems and then ask students to discuss with each other what they might be about. If you have access to the internet you could ask them to find out about two of the titles and then form a group afterwards to discuss the books.
3 Now ask them to think of a country, a household object and and a period in history
eg France, spoon, 1950's
4 Students then create their own weird and wonderful titles
eg A Definitive History of French Provincial Spoons 1949 -1959.
5 Students then pretend to be the author and explain to their partner the contents of the book and why they wrote it. Encourage them to be as silly as possible.
6 Finally if you have time get them to write the blurb. See here for a lesson plan I did for this last year.
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