LESSON OVERVIEW
With this lesson plan students learn and practise some useful news language and reflect on the problem of misinformation on social media.
This is a Critical Reading Club worksheet. With this format, students need to read an online article at home and do the exercises in the classroom. Learn more about how to use such worksheets and their benefits in our post.
ACTIVITIES
As an introduction to the lesson, students discuss a statement saying that ‘misinformation spreads like a virus’ and explain what it means and what contributes to the phenomenon. Then, they focus on the news language and analyse six sentences with the aim of choosing a word (out of three given words) that doesn’t create a correct collocation (e.g. flag/guard/report the content). Once the odd words have been found, students try to come up with their synonyms (e.g. disseminate – spread, biased – partial).
The vocabulary tasks lead to a discussion on tackling misinformation on social media. Students get the chance to share their ways of discerning dubious information online. Finally, they take a closer look at the approaches to mitigating misinformation on social media, their effectiveness and related problems. They also try to come up with their own ideas other than institutionalized fact-checking or flagging untrustworthy content.