Wednesday 26 May 2010

Current affairs in the English classroom

I think it is a good idea to deal with news stories in a lesson. Students are usually interested in current issues, such as politics, disasters, celebrities and special events. Teachers can take advantage of their students' interest and teach them some new vocabulary. In addition, a lesson like this is certainly communicative as everybody must have an opinion about the actual happenings.

This time I prepared an exercise about the current volcano eruption.
At first students need to match the following expressions with the pictures.

FORECAST, CANCELLATIONS, ENGINE, VOLCANO, ASH, ERUPTION, GROUNDED TOURISTS, ICELAND

After naming the pictures, clarifying their meaning and pronunciation (especially: volcano = /vɒlˈkeɪnəʊ/ and eruption = /ɪˈrʌpʃn/ ) , I would ask a student to summarize the current story of the Icelandic volcano with the help of the new expressions.

Another exercise would be to match the two halves of some expressions still in connection with the eruption and its consequences.

Students would read the solutions one by one and form a sentence with each of the expressions.

Hope you like these exercises. Do you ever deal with current affairs in your lessons?

2 comments:

Dávid said...

One of my students got stranded in London for a whole week in April. This is a good topic that everyone knows quite well. But from next week with my all-male group we'll be talking about the football worldcup, I'm sure:)

Good luck with the blog!

Patricia said...

This is a very interesting topic.
Welcome to the blogosphere!