Dark tourism

This ESL lesson plan explores the topic of dark tourism. It is focused on speaking and listening. You can combine it with the lessons “Travel destinations“, “Accessible tourism“, “Adventure tourism and extreme tourism“, and “The Chernobyl disaster“.
Speaking: The lesson starts with a speaking task. Students are given a few photos of popular dark tourism sites (Chernobyl, Auschwitz, Alcatraz) and a few questions to discuss.
Vocabulary: The vocabulary task is focused on adjectives (morbid, emotionally draining, creepy). Students are given a few sentences with the adjectives and they need to match them to their definitions. There is a gap-fill task as practice. As a speaking practice , there are 3 statements given.
Next, there is another speaking task: students talk about the Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to behaving respectfully and appropriately when doing dark tourism.
Video: Students watch a video “How to do ‘Dark Tourism’ respectfully” and complete 3 tasks. First, they watch the first 2 minutes of the video and answer 2 questions, then they watch the second part and write down the tips the speakers mention and finally, they watch the second part again and take notes about different tourist sites mentioned in the video.
Collocations: students complete 7 collocations from the video (morbid fascination, hallowed grounds, war atrocities). The definitions are also provided.
The last 2 tasks focus on speaking. In the first one, students brainstorm potential dark tourism sites in their country, they choose 1 and write a description for a dark tourism web page. The last task is a debate about dark tourism.