| 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.
ARTICLE
WORKSHEETS
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excellent~
Another fantastic lesson!
Thanks 🙂
Thanks for such effective lesson plan with an important topic
Thanks for the comment 🙂
This is great!
Unfortunately, thanks to Twitter’s, ahem, big change, the linked article hasn’t aged well.
Yeah, that’s true – the experiment the article describes was done in the pre-X era. However, X (aka Twitter) introduced some sort of user-driven fact-checking tool called Community Notes in order to tackle misinformation. The way it works and whether it’s an effective tool for the job is another question but I guess it’s an evolution of the original idea to involve users in the fight against misinformation.