Activity 5: The internet as a source

Create an activity based on one of the three webs seen in the class.

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Become a detective and solve the case

Aim: The main aim of the task we created is basically the improvement of the students’ second/foreign language communicative skills.

Time: It could be completed in a one-hour session or it could be employed as a weekly or monthly exercise. Nevertheless, we think that developing the activity over a long period of time may boost much more the learners’ oral skills.

Age: The activity is mainly addressed to teens and young adults. It could also be adapted to children by changing the topic of the story used. However, the age varies depending on the text chosen.

Warm up: Show them a fragment of a T.V series about a detective who was in jail unfairly and once he is out he tries to discover who really committed the crime (LIFE). In this way the topic of the activity is introduced. After watching the fragment, a short discussion will take place about other series sharing this topic.

Procedure:

First step: The teacher divides the class in groups of four (or less) students. If the number of students in a single group is too big probably some of them won’t talk at all. Each of the groups will represent a group of detectives trying to solve the case that would be presented to them by the teacher. We do these division in order to motivate them, since the possibility of being the first group to complete the task would do so.

Second step: The teacher should read out loud to the class the several paragraphs of the story chosen from http://www.mysterynet.com/. This would be done just once, so the students in each group should take notes of important pieces of information related to the case they need to solve.

Third step: The students now need to compare the notes they’ve taken from the story told by the teacher. They have to decide what is important and what it is not in order to find the answer. They would be encouraged to create any kind of tools to help them solve the case: posters in which they pin down clues, suspects’ cards, maps, etc These secondary activities may as well improve their vocabulary.

Follow up: Once the groups have guessed how to solve the case they would have to do a little presentation in front of their classmates and defend their findings. A debate among them would be started to see how they have reached those conclusions. After that, the whole story would be read out to really know how things happened.