Hold the front page!

I think that this little exercise is one of the most fun activities that you can do that will vastly improve your English when you are over the basic level. This is to imagine that you are a journalist for the day.

Watch an old Agatha Christie crime story, such as Hercule Poirot, or any crime series really for this little project, then write a front page article for the newspaper after watching either a clip or a full episode. Don’t just try to do a simple report that just states the facts, try to use your imagination, report perhaps what a certain character had witnessed, or even imagine you also had the opportunity to interview either Hercule himself, one of his sidekicks, or any of the many suspects in the case.

This little exercise will help you to use all your tenses, to describe past activities and the backgrounds of the people involved, where they have been and who or what they say they saw at the time. Also, practice how to describe the current activities of an on-going investigation as well as the planned future activities of the investigation.

Then perhaps think about the task of interviewing the individual characters from the investigation. Try to ask direct questions relating to the episode and the character’s role in the events in order to expand upon the original crime report. You could try creating your own video news report and practice your pronunciation too, to check how you sound when you speak English, and get your teacher or another native speaker to check your work. So the written English exercise turns into a spoken English exercise as well.

I think crime drama adds a bit of spice which helps to fire up the imagination. Why not try this on a wet and rainy Sunday afternoon?

Contact Rachel today > http://www.italki.com/teacher/1394345

May 21, 2014/0 Comments/by Jessica