which was obviously much better than it was getting at home.
I was just living in the factory.
And they thought they had a burglar because it's tripping the alarm all
the time and they eventually discovered on the security cameras that it was a cat.
Now, who wouldn't like that?
I mean, I can imagine there might be some very sort of dull people that wouldn't
fall for that.
But that is engaging, is a sort of saying that you might say did you hear about this
cat that was, when they found it by the way it was massively overweight which was
the other thing about it.
The [INAUDIBLE] gone from being a very small cat, a very large cat,
there was a picture of it, and it was the size of a dog.
So I would start there.
That's I think is an engaging story.
I think that I would choose an authentically
written piece about that because you could find it in all sorts of newspapers.
And that I would give it to students to work on in pairs, actually.
That they would have to read it together to make sure that they understood it.
So that they could help each other out if there was vocabulary which they were
stuck on.
So I think that's quite important to do the task with someone else.
And I could imagine taking it from there into asking them to,
depending on their age group of course, to recreate that as their own writing.
Or to recreate it even, dare I say, as a speaking task,
where they would tell the story to an audience.
If they were children,
they could be doing a school newspaper where they would try to tell stories.
If they were adults you probably wouldn't want to do that.
So you can see it's going to very much depend on who you've got and
what they want and how much they want to enjoy themselves and
how serious they are about it.
But I think the whole idea of starting with the text which exist already
is actually very important.
>> And what happens, let's say, if you got a lower level
group of learners who might not be able to read this story as is?
Would you modify the text, or would you try to look for
something that's probably more simple?
>> It's a question which gets people quite cross.
It's about whether it should be completely authentic or
whether you should've fiddled with it.
When you know that the reading age for
a lot of the papers is about eight, isn't it.
As if you were to take something from the Metro, for example, in London,
this is a free newspaper that's existing, it's millions or view more.
You probably wouldn't have to.
If you took it from approaching newspaper, maybe you would.
But I would try not to because I would like students to ask each other
what does that mean.
Especially with, for example,
the panel that you get with the headline is obviously very bewildering.
It would be nice to have some sort of chats about that but
I would provide a gloss only if it was like saying this happened in.
What's that?
Northwest London.
Something like that.
But otherwise I would want them to work it out for themselves.
>> Would you give any help with vocabulary before the task begins?
>> No.
No, they'll tell me, or they'll figure it out.