Scribd
Upload
2K views

Writing A News Report - Lesson Plan

news-report-lesson-plan

Uploaded by

Anita Jankovic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
2K views

Writing A News Report - Lesson Plan

news-report-lesson-plan

Uploaded by

Anita Jankovic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

Writing a news report

Topic: News reports

Aims:
- To develop students' abilities to organise information and construct it into a
text
- To develop students' abilities to revise, redraft and improve their writing
- To develop students' abilities to construct questions

Level: Pre-Intermediate and above

Introduction
During this lesson students will go through the process of developing ideas and
collecting and organising information. They will then use the information to create
the first draft of an imaginary news article. They will then focus on some key areas
of good writing and try to redraft their articles with these in mind.

A variety of follow up tasks are offered after the main plan.

Procedure

Pre writing tasks:

Rationale: This part of the lesson should give students the opportunity to collect
information before writing the news report. This should reduce the amount of
creativity needed during the actual writing.

• Write up the headline:

Mystery Disappearance of English Teacher: Students Suspected

• Put the students in groups or pairs to try to predict the content of the story
and what may have happened to the teacher.

• Get the students to change groups and compare what they think may have
happened.

• Give out a pile of about 10 or 15 slips of paper. Tell the students to write a
question about the story on each slip of paper and give each one to you.
(You might want to put up some question words on the board to help
prompt them. i.e. Who…? What time…? How many…? Etc.)

• As they give you the slips of paper write very brief answers on them and
give them back.

Tip: This works best if the students give each question to you as soon as they write it and you
write your answer on their slip of paper and return it immediately. The answers you give them will
help to prompt them to produce more questions.
If you have a very large class this may not be possible and you may want to stage this over more
than one lesson so you have time to write all the replies.
www.teachingenglish.org.uk
© BBC | British Council 2010
TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

• Stop when the students have either used up all their slips of paper or run
out of questions.

• Students then collect up the information they have on the slips of paper.
Tell them they will use the information to compose a news report to go with
the headline. Before they start writing the report ask them to decide what
order they will put the information in.

Tip: A common order for newspaper reports of this kind is:


• Headline
• General info about crime
• More details about what happened
• A description of any suspects or the criminals
• What police have done / are doing to try to solve the crime (possible appeal for
whitnesses)

Writing Tasks
• Once they have grouped the information tell them to write the report and
make sure to include all the information from their questions.

• Once the students have written their reports ask them to exchange them
with another student and give out the Editor's checklist. The students then
use this to check through each other's work and write on any comments or
suggestions for improvement.

Editor's checklist:
• Is the information grouped into logical paragraphs?
• Are the paragraphs in a logical order?
• Is there any unnecessary information?
• Is any necessary information missing?
• Are there any parts that you can't understand?
• Are a lot of the same words repeated?
• Can more precise words be used?
• Is there too much repetition of linkers like and, but, then etc?
• Do all the verbs agree with their subjects? (e.g. she are is …)
• Have articles (the, a, an) been used correctly?
• Have the correct verb forms been used?
• Is the punctuation correct?
• Have all the words been spelt correctly?

• They then give the checked report back to the original writer who makes
any corrections or changes and produces a final draft.

Tip: Generally I've found that the process of drafting, adding comments and redrafting works best
when done on a word processor as it is much easier for students to make changes to their text
without having to rewrite the whole thing.

If your students don't have access to computers then you might consider spreading the redrafting
over more than one lesson.

www.teachingenglish.org.uk
© BBC | British Council 2010
TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

Possible follow up tasks


• Put the reports up on the walls around the class and get the students to
look at them all and choose the one they think is best.

OR

• Collect up the students' slips of paper with their questions on and do some
error correction work.

OR

• Collect some short authentic news articles from either the internet or
newspapers and tell the students to compare them with their own:
They should look for:
The way information is organised (how many paragraphs, what is the focus
of each paragraph?)
The verb forms or structures used (present perfect, present simple, active
or passive?)
Ways in which the writer has made the writing more exciting (use of
adverb, adjectives, variety of lexis)

OR

• Give the students the following headline:

Mystery of the Disappearing Teacher Solved


• Ask them to produce a report for the radio or TV on how the mystery was
solved and what happened. They could even include interviews with the
teacher and students involved
(You could record this or video it if you have access to a camera)

www.teachingenglish.org.uk
© BBC | British Council 2010

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy