At times there are extremely busy school days when you ran out of fun and motivating teaching ideas. How do you survive those days? Luckily I have a lot of creative, knowledgeable, and fun colleagues (friends) around to get teaching ideas and activities. Nazan Ozcinar and Mahir Sarigul are my lighthouse in this respect with their resourcefulness and creativity. Both are teacher trainers who are also working for Turkish Ministry of National Education (MONE) giving workshops to many teachers-not only my lighthouse you see!

Today they will be guests to my blog, answering my questions and talking about “Glocal News” which is an activity that they use in their classes to revise and reinforce reading, writing, listening and speaking as well as literacy skills.

What is “Glocal News” Video Presentation?

Mahir S. : “Glocal” is a blended word for global and local and basically it is an activity in wich language learners are asked to read about a news at home or abroad through the Internet and pick up one specific event related to social, political, economic, sports, or art.  They need to learn about it in detail by either reading the online newspapers, news websites, and/or TV channels, and video recordings and take notes, underline points that they think are important and worth mentioning. When & where did it start / happened? How did it start / happened?Who is involved? What are the reason(s)? What is the present situation?…etc. Based on the information they’ve gathered, they are asked to prepare a 3-4 minute video presentation and report it orally in a video.

How much preparation time and what resources are needed?

Mahir S: Before setting the task I familiarize the students with news headlines by showing them newspaper sites in English such as Turkish daily news and pre-teach some common newspaper terminology. I focus on some basic grammatical features of newspaper language to set the scene. (Check out these on-line sources for further information: Newspaper Language   and Understanding newspaper headlines  

Not to mention the input for delivering presentations which is an objective of the academic English courses that we teach… Also, I gave a task sheet to guide the students through the process of pre, while and post recording and ask students to pay attention to:

• Sound quality (it is highly recommended that they should use an outside microphone)
• Image quality (it is of utmost importance to adjust the light to get a good picture quality.)
• Avoiding reading from notes or a text (the more natural they speak the better)
• Viewing the recording before submitting it in order not to send their instructor a piece of slipshod work
• Importance of greet your audience in the beginning and include some closing remarks in the end .

Therefore in the “Key Language section” on the task sheet I provide a list of useful phrases including “I think…, I believe that…, In my opinion…, I feel that…., It is said that…, People believe that…, It is beyond any doubt that…etc.” Other than these it is mostly students’ hands on work with minimal preparation time for the teacher.

Nazan, you recorded your own Glocal News presentation for your students to model the activity. Did you enjoy while making the video? Thanks for sharing it with us…

GLOCAL NEWS Nazan_mpeg4

Nazan O. : I enjoyed it a lot but I had to rerecord it 3 times because I wanted it to be perfect.

How were the reactions of the students? Any Difficulties?

My intermediate level students liked it a lot and saw that the video was 4 minutes and thought it would be a difficult task for them. I’ll see the results in the coming weeks. And I’ll let you know about it. It’s an excellent chance for students to practise their speaking skills.

In addition to speaking, what are the other benefits of the activity?

 Nazan O: There is a feedback sheet that accompanies the presentation. After their performance we watch it together with the student and they get feedback on their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and speaking skills. It takes some time to give feed