25 April 2017 / by Ryan Beaudelaire

How to adapt articles - Oxbridge activites

Oxinity Friday Meeting - Barcelona

How to adapt articles

Today at our team meeting here in Barcelona we worked together to practice how best to adapt articles to match the different levels of our students when we are creating and teaching Oxbridge Topic Activities.

We´re always looking to each other for tips and hints on how to create better, more relevant and concise activities and this week British politics once again caught our interest (obviously!) with an article on the upcoming snap election, so we got straight to it, and started creating a topic activity to get the latest news to our students - in fun interactive topic activity kinda way!!

Now, we like to make sure that the latest new articles and current affairs are part of our classes for the different levels we teach, so we need to be prepared to adapt these articles from a native audience to various levels of Esl students.

Top tips from our Michael Turnbull

In order to adapt articles best, Michael says that all the important information is at the beginning, this is where we find all the good stuff, to entice the reader! Then there is normally a summary or quote to pull you into the article, followed by another quote to hook take you in further. He says when cropping the text ¨Cut it once keeping all the relevant information, then cut it again pulling out the unnecessary sentences until it´s the size you want.¨

What we did today - Editing team!

Well, we got engrossed in this article on the UK snap election and decided to use the power of the team to adapt it for teaching. We got into teams of 2 teachers and starting cropping, cutting and editing the article to suit a P5 class and another for a P3 class.

Here is the original article, have a read and see what you think, then below have a look at our new adapted versions.

Our P3 and P5 versions,

Click here - Edited articles

Target Language

Now we have our adapted articles, we need some target language. So, we went through the articles together and agreed on target language that we thought would be useful for each level. Have a look and see what you think.

P3 target language

Held-up Polls Reality-check Resilience Uncertainty Debt Rising Painful Aftermath Prospect Regain Triggered

On-hold Squeezed Heightened Weaker Relocation Dropped Sharply Outcome

P5 target Language

Call (for an election) Hampering Stunned Lawmakers Breakup (go) Right back up Fraying Surges Mandate Mounting

(hard) Stance Snap (election) Narrowly (voted) Sharply (fell) Hard/soft Brexit Links (with the EU)

Idioms - Pay a heavier price Clean but painful break Cracks starting to appear

Good luck in the editing room!

So, if you need some help adapting articles top create Esl activities, we hope this experience share has been helpful. Use it as a guide for your own creations! And share it with a friend, we like to share the love!

Good luck and have fun in the editing room!

Team Oxinity Barcelona.