Bolsonaro’s fake news campaign – a conversation lesson

If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen the photo below. It shows the board work of a lesson I taught yesterday, based on an article from the Guardian describing the WhatsApp scandal in the Brazilian presidential elections.

It’s unlikely this lesson is for you if you don’t live in Brazil, but enough of my friends showed interest in it that I decided to make a quick post for it.

Thi, Eduardo, Gustavo and Ana, this one is for you 🙂

This lesson is aimed at C1 students. If you want to use it with B2 students, I’d recommend changing the words in red on the slides (using simpler words), possibly making the text a little shorter and pre-teaching some of the words that appear in bold in the text.

Here are the materials for this lesson:

Text in PDF format, ready to print.

Text in DOC, in case you want to edit it.

PPT on Dropbox.

PPT on Google Drive.

If you have been following my blog, you should do the drill by now. Unfortunately I don’t have time to write a step-by-step description, but here are a few notes:

• I didn’t use a video in this lesson, mainly because the text is long and I didn’t think I’d have time. I’m sure it’s easy to find one on YouTube, though.
• I used the first question in the text to being up compound adjectives (far-right, pro-torture, dictatorship-praising) and compare their stress with compound nouns.
• I also worked with the pronunciation of plural nouns and how the -s at the end of lies and news sounds like a /z/.
• The last slide has questions using the new language aimed at teachers. If that’s not your target audience you will need to adapt them.

One last thing, which Hulgo Freitras mentioned in a presentation I had the chance to watch last week is: if you are going to bring up these kinds of discussions in class you need to be prepared to listen to some opinions you might disagree with. Be prepared to deal with them.

Thanks for reading and let’s hope for the best!