CRAZY HEADLINE SPEAKING GAME (A2, B1)

Have fun with this speaking game or just read the following headlines and enjoy yourself: 

• Before doing the activity students should know some vocabulary and expressions related to news programmes. They should also be familiar with the lexical field of crimes.

• Students work in pairs. There are 17 headlines, enough for all of them (I guess).

• Play the following presentation/video about crazy headlines and newspaper vocabulary.

• Your students have to invent 1-2 minute pieces of news related to the headlines given.

• You can play the whole video and then, assign a headline to each pair of students. This way, they can work together and create their own pieces of news. Five minutes should be enough for them to have an idea and improvise.

• They can take turns to speak (as if both of them were news anchors) or make a short introductory conversation (for example, one can be the tv host and the other a witness or a reporter giving the audience further details on the story).

• If they do not understand the headline given or cannot invent a story, they lose.

Caveats and options

• Introduce the journalism jargon to your students and watch videos to make it more "realistic". Remember to introduce passive voice, question tags, present perfect and the like.

NEWS VOCABULARY. JOURNALIST JARGON. JUANA MORAL'S ENGLISH SITE. SPEAKING

• You can create a kind of "hot seat" so they have to create a piece of news really quickly. That is, they create their stories as you play the video.

• Organize different rounds for the winners. 

• Make them create their silly headlines for future competitions.

• Transform this activity into a writing task: Use these headlines as prompts for them to write a newspaper report. 

• HAVE FUN AND SPEAK!!