ESL-plans

Learned Helplessness

Level	Category	Format	Duration
B1-C1	General English	Video	90 min

What's the "Learned Helplessness" ESL Lesson About?

B1-C1 · General English

Main Objectives

• Understand the psychological concept of learned helplessness through historical experiments and real-life examples;
• Practice word formation by applying the suffixes -ness, -less, and -lessness to create nouns and adjectives;
• Explore the linguistic phenomenon of anagrams and their creative use in literature.

About This Lesson

In this lesson, students begin by exploring word formation, categorizing words that take the suffixes -ness, -less, and the combined -lessness, before using them to complete personal reflection questions (e.g., priceless, fearless, speechless). The lesson then introduces the core psychological concept of learned helplessness. Students sequence and analyze the stages of Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier's classic experiment, distinguishing between the control group, the escapable shock group, and the inescapable shock group to understand how a cognitive expectation of unavoidable failure develops. Next, students engage with a linguistic puzzle by identifying anagrams (e.g., listen to silent) and exploring Vladimir Nabokov's creative use of anagrams as character names in his novel Lolita. Finally, learners watch a video of Charisse Nixon's classroom anagram experiment, observing how students react when given unsolvable puzzles, and discuss how this induced helplessness manifests in real-world social environments like dating, peer pressure, and childhood victimization.

This lesson is designed to fit within a single 90 min session. The video component works well as homework before the live session.

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