Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 12

5. Students are then given time to write sentences on slips of paper representing
description as well as interpretation of the pictures. The teacher will collect the
slips and redistribute them to groups of students who will analyse the sentences
and group them under the two categories: description and interpretation.
5. Headlines
Rationale
After students have read or listened to a text, they need to analyse it for its main
meaning. One way to do this is to encourage them to summarise the text in a few
words. It’s also a useful way to develop their note-taking skills. A fun way to do this
is to have students read or listen to short texts from a newspaper or radio or TV
news and write a headline. Further discussion of the topic of headlines will lead to
the concept of “clickbait”, which will be analysed with examples, with a view to
raising awareness towards these unethical journalism strategies. This serves to
teach students how to see beyond the alluring headlines and exercise their own
critical thinking when exposed to media messages.
Procedure
1 The teacher shows students some headlines from different newspapers or news
websites. For each one, the students are asked to say what they think the news
story was about. Afterwards the teacher asks them to say what the purpose of a
headline is. (Possible answer: To summarise the story and attract the reader’s
interest)
2 The teacher gives out some short news stories or plays three or four short
recordings of different news items. For each one, students try to write a news
headline which summarises the main meaning of the text. Recordings of news
items should be played at least twice to give students the chance to understand all
the details.
3 The teacher asks students to work in groups and compare their headlines to see
if they summarised similar information or used similar words from the text.
4 The teacher gives students examples of headlines and asks them how familiar
they are with the wording and how likely they are to read the articles with these
headlines.
 Man tries to hug a wild lion. You won’t believe what happens next.
 21 stars who ruined their faces due to plastic surgery
 Man divorced his wife after knowing what is in this photo
 15 hilarious tweets of stupid people that make you think: “Do
these people even exist?”
 Can you solve this ancient riddle? 90% of the people gave the
wrong answer
 Supermodels use these simple tricks to stay young. Find out their
secrets
 You might suffer from a serious condition if you experience these
symptoms
 15 perfect tweets that sum up student life (no 13 is hilarious)
The teacher asks students to look for definitions of “clickbait”. Once the students
understand that these titles use specific strategies to attract attention and
encourage visitors to access specific sites, they are asked to try and formulate the
strategies illustrated in the examples above.
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