Authentic Learning | Beware of Crimes! (And what they can teach you.)

It seems like these con artists are everywhere and their points of persuasion range from the tragic news of kidnap to happier ones like lottery winnings. More recent experiences have had individuals falling prey to scam calls from individuals pretending to be police officers, even!

Now you might be wondering, what does knowing about this have to do with English?

As it turns out, there’s meaning and resource aplenty to be found in reading such posters! Here are but three ways you can learn authentic english from crimes and how helpful it can be for the examinations, from looking at things we encounter every day.

Authentic resources: Posters, brochures, newspaper articles, television programmes

Areas that can be applied for assessment: Writing, Oral, Cloze Passage, Vocabulary

Activities:

1. Building Real Characters

When we look at them, we not only gain an understanding of the ‘type’ of people that scammers might be targeting and so avoid being these people in the first place, but also a source of ideas for thinking up characters in a composition that might involve such storylines. From studying these posters together, you and your child might be able to draw out a list of characteristics that such scammers look out for in their victims. For one, it seems typical that scammers rely on the victims’ ignorance of such scams, before drawing on other aspects like the victims’ loneliness, greed or fear. If you are ready for more, you can also take note of the characteristics of these scammers as well and how they might have presented themselves to their potential victims.

With lists like this, and some real world learning about how to guard themselves from such compromising situations, your children will be ready with some convincing characters for their next composition or discussion during oral!

2. Growing Storylines

You can both try playing Sherlock as well by assembling a crime wall of sorts by looking at newspaper articles reporting such scams. Knowing the relationship between the people involved in the crime and how such a crime happened will give your child an authentic way of understanding how a problem could have taken place and how it was resolved.

Help your child identify who the victims are and how they came to meet the scammer or how the scammer identified the victim as his or her latest target. Both of you could then pick out information like what the scammer said, how the victim reacted which led to the problem of being cheated, and how the scammer was apprehended. If the scammer has not yet been caught, encourage your child to follow the news for more updates on this particular crime.

This activity could even see you both tracking the various types of scams and finding similarities between the crimes as you look for the how’s and why’s of the problem and finally, the solutions.  Be sure to make it a really visual affair! Use the posters or the pictures in articles if you’d like to make it even more realistic.

3. Picking up Vocabulary

You would notice that such crime reports and posters use similar phrases and vocabulary to talk about and discuss these crimes. These are things you and your child could pick up as well, to write into their existing notebook of vocabulary words or even to add to your (now-elaborate) crime wall. Your child can choose to jot down the meaning, write a sentence or even write down the sentence from the article where the vocabulary was used. Phrases like ‘fall victim to’, ‘be wary of’ and ‘lodge a report’ or words like ‘remit’ and ‘extortion’ are great additions to your child’s compositions when they are looking to write about a similar situation. With these words at the back of their mind, formulating their sentences and using them to relay the situation accurately would make for a more enjoyable writing experience.