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66 Maximizing learning opportunities
for their interviews. Depending on time, resources, and the nature of the story, they can talk to their family members, their teachers, their neighbors, or even city council officials. The objective here is to gather different perspectives on the same story.
3.2.6 Ask the learners to discuss within their group the full story and the reactions to it. They should then write a brief consensus report on it.
3.2.7 Have each group present its report to whole class, followed by class discussion.
3.2.8 After the class discussion is over, ask them to share with the class what they actually learned in doing the project. In addition to any linguistic items they may have learned, the focus here should be on the story itself, how it unfolded/ended, whether it unfolded/ended the way they expected, whether they had any difficulty with their negotiating, decision-making, interviewing skills, etc.
3.2.9 At higher levels of proficiency, you may ask the learners to compare how different channels of communication (newspaper, radio, and TV) shape news coverage. You may also encourage them to think critically on any bias in reporting, and how language is used (or mani- pulated) to present a particular point of view.
Microstrategy 3.3: Connecting with the Global Community
3.3.0 This microstrategy is designed to help learners cross the phys- ical borders of their classroom and their local community in order to create learning opportunities. They will do so by entering virtual com- munities in cyberspace and by using the Internet as a tool for partici- patory research. In settings where access to the Internet is limited or unavailable, traditional sources of information such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV may be used to do a simplified version of this activity.
In this project, teachers and learners will connect with the global community to explore certain aspects of economic and cultural glob- alization, with particular reference to McDonald’s. Yes, McDonald’s! The golden arches is something that is familiar to most city-dwelling students in most countries. The reason behind selecting McDonald’s for this microstrategy is to prompt the participants to think globally about something they know locally. This microstrategy can be imple- mented at different levels of sophistication. What follows is one pos- sible activity that I deliberately designed to be fairly extended. Teach- ers should feel free to change it by deleting or diluting parts of it to suit their particular situation.