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Ideas for E.L.L.s: Finding Reliable Sources in a World of ‘Fake News’

A display of Google devices. Google said it would ban purveyors of fake news on the web from using its online advertising service, AdSense. Related ArticleCredit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

All month we’re publishing news-literacy lesson plans devoted to helping students determine why, how and where to find reliable information at a time when “fake news” is headline news.

You might begin with our broadest lesson, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News, which contains scores of activities and questions that can be adapted for almost any audience.

We’ve also published a STEM-specific lesson, ‘Chocolate Found to Stave Off Death!’ Analyzing the Scientific Evidence Behind Health Headlines.

The ideas in this lesson are specifically for English-language learners and their teachers since, though sorting “fake news” from real news is increasingly difficult for all of us, for E.L.L.’s, the language barrier adds an additional layer of complexity. The strategies and tools below, therefore, do not depend so much on understanding the nuances of the English language as they do on common sense and critical thinking.

Let us know how you approach current events in your E.L.L. classroom by posting a comment.

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Part One: Why Should Our Students Keep Up With The News?

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Begin by asking students: “Is it important to keep up with the news? If so, why? If not, why not?”

Wait time is important for all students, and particularly so for E.L.L.s. Give students a few minutes to think about your question and have them write down their responses. The Common Core Standards emphasize collaboration, which can mean having students work on their own, share their work to receive feedback from classmates, and then revise it to make it better.

Apply this concept in the lesson by having students share what they wrote in small groups. You might also provide them a few question-starters they can use to “dig deeper” (I’m confused when you say ________. Can you elaborate?). As students revise after their discussions, invite them to share while you compile their responses on the whiteboard or document camera.

You might get answers like the ones I heard from my students:

“We need to know so we sound smart.”

“The world affects us, so we need to know so we’re prepared.”

“We want to be good citizens, so have to know what’s going on.” (Note: For follow-up lessons based on this response, teachers might want to explore two previous Learning Network posts for E.L.L.s, “Ideas For E.L.L.s: Civics and Citizenship and “Ideas For English Language Learner: What Does It Mean To Be A Citizen?”)

“Our friends will be impressed we know so much.”

It’s unlikely you’ll get responses saying it’s not important — especially after going through the process of collaboration. However, if you do, just list it along with the other positive ones.

For many American E.L.L. students, since they are immigrants or have families that include immigrants, you may get a response, as I did, like “They’re trying to get rid of us. We need to know so we can protect ourselves.” They may also realize that keeping abreast of the news is an important real-world skill when criminals often take advantage of those with language difficulties and lack of familiarity with U.S. laws via scams like these.

In addition, fake news can be used to inaccurately make immigrants targets of political blame — for example, the falsehood that there were three million illegal votes in the 2016 presidential election.

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Part Two: Where Should E.L.L. Students Get Their News?

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Screenshot from Smithsonian’s TweenTribune

After students have agreed that it’s important to keep up-to-date with the news, ask them to take a minute and write down all the different places from which they get their news.

Remind them to include everything from specific newspapers and radio and television stations to social media sites, their friends and their relatives. As they call them out, make a class list. If some students list sites with less-than-reliable news, the teacher can list them and make a mental note to return to the list at the end of the lesson.

The teacher can quickly show on the computer projector additional places students might want to consider visiting for news, including The New York Times as well as sites, like those below, that are particularly accessible to English Language Learners. I’ve made two more complete lists, but here are my favorites (not in any order of preference):

News in Levels and the Smithsonian’s Tween Tribune provide articles about current events that can be read on multiple levels of text complexity depending on students’ English proficiency.

Learning English from the Voice of America provides texts and videos about current events that are also designed to help E.L.L.s learn English.

Youngzine and the Newsround from the BBC both provide regularly updated news articles designed to be specifically more accessible to young readers.

Newsmap and Newser both provide short news summaries in visually engaging formats.

The Learning Network also has a new feature suitable for many English-language learners called Picture Prompt. Each piece uses an arresting image from a news or feature story, summarizes it quickly, then poses questions about it and links back to the original story.

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Examples of The Learning Network’s daily Picture Prompt.

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Part Three: How Can Students Tell The Difference Between Fake News And Real News?

Briefly introduce the concept of “fake news” to students. (In our general lesson plan, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News, we quote this article: “Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up article with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, and in the process, the definition of fake news has blurred.” For E.L.L. students, however, you might just ask them if they have heard the term, and if so, what they think it means — then summarize just the first sentence of the Times story.)

Since it’s likely that some students may have listed friends as their news sources, point out that their friends probably also get news from them, so they want to be sure they are not passing on anything unreliable. If they listed Facebook as a source, you can briefly talk about the widely-publicized problems that social media platform has had with fake news. You might also ask either or both of these core questions we pose in our general lesson plan:

• When have you or someone you know fallen for or shared fake or inaccurate news of some kind?

• Why does it matter if we can’t tell real news from fake news?

Explain that there are several ways to tell the difference between fake and real news, but point out it’s still possible to be tricked even if you know them. We recommend using On the Media’s guidelines, as shown in the image above. (You can listen to the whole show here for more detail, and find additional chapters in the group’s clear and helpful “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” here.) If any of the language here is too difficult for your students, you might recast it with easier vocabulary:

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You can also use these Ten Questions for Fake News Detection from the News Literacy Project.

After applying these checks to an article, if students are still suspicious, they can do two things:

• Type the headline or topic of the story into a search engine to see if clearly legitimate news organizations like The New York Times or CNN host similar stories.

• Visit a fact-checking site like FactCheck.org, Snopes.com and Politifact.com to see if the story appears there, and how those sites rate that news.



Real or Fake? A Challenge

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The Syrian government, backed by Russia, announced on Thursday that a cease-fire agreement with Syrian rebels and Turkey would begin Friday. Syrians have mixed feelings about the truce.CreditCredit...Abd Doumany/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Next, show students two examples of a lede from a news story and ask them to write down — either on their paper or, ideally, on individual mini-whiteboards they can hold up — which one they think is real and which is fake. They should use the previous list to identify specific evidence that supports their choices.

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Example One:

Syrian Government Announces Truce Backed by Russia and Turkey

Url: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/world/middleeast/syria-cease-fire.html
By Ben Hubbard and Neil MacFarquhar, Dec. 29, 2016

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A cease-fire agreement between Syria’s government and weakened rebel forces that have been trying to topple it is scheduled to start on Friday, a potential turning point in a nearly six-year conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and shredded every hope of resolution.

Example Two:

Syrian Government Announces Truce — Plans Attack On U.S.
Url: http://www.cnn.com.co

The Syrian government announced plans to stop its country’s civil war on Friday and attack the United States to take revenge against the U.S because it has supported Syrian rebels for many years.

Which do they think is the real story? Why? What specifically raised red flags for them in the fake story? What more could they do to verify which is fake and which is real? (Note to teachers: I made the second one up, and thus the URL isn’t real.)

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Related EditorialCredit...MERTO/WILLEY

Part Four: Understanding the Issues By Writing Fake and Real News

Explain to students that now it’s time for them to apply what they have learned by writing their own fake news lede that uses some of the many characteristics of unreliable news they have just read about.

Tell them that a lede is the first line or paragraph of a news story that summarizes the most important information, and typically answers many, if not all, of the main news questions — Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? Using the Syria stories above, you can have students complete the Graphic Organizer for Creating or Analyzing a Lede sheet (pdf) to point out how both the fake and real ledes in the Syria stories answered most of those questions.

Then, invite students to choose any classroom-appropriate topic, such as news from the school or community, and a fake lede about it. If they choose something that is genuine news — for example, news from the front page of The Times or any other newspaper — have them use the graphic organizer to analyze the real story, then use a new version of the organizer to create their own fake one. If they use a local story, have them create two versions — a fake lede and a real lede.

For instance, many of my students chose to do something classroom-focused: “Mr. Ferlazzo announced on Monday that everyone would get an A and nobody had to go to class” began a fake story, while the real story was more accurately written as, “Mr. Ferlazzo announced on Monday that there would be a test on Friday and he expected everyone to study.” Students in my E.L.L. history classes used famous news stories from the past to do this same exercise.

When they are finished, students can read their stories aloud in groups and challenge their classmates to say which is fake and which is real and, most importantly, why.

Note: If students had earlier identified any fake news sites when they shared where they got their news, this could be the time when the class could revisit that list of sites. The teacher could project that site and other ones students had identified on a screen and lead students in applying the fake and real news criteria to each one.

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How do you deal with current events in your E.L.L. classroom? Let us know in the comments, and if you use The New York Times, we’d love to hear your thoughts for our Reader Ideas column.

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