I really appreciate the regular news lessons from sites tlike The Grauniad and BreakingNewsEnglish, but I can’t work out why most of them have the exact same activities week after week. For me, repeating the same activity over and over means that you think you have already discovered the best possible ways to teach and learn English and so all you need to do is carry on using them or mix them up in different ways (= postmodernism??)

Being much more neurotic about my own lessons and materials, I feel I have little choice but to continuously experiment in the hope of coming up with solutions to the inadequacies of everything I have tried so far. Luckily, I find that if you let the format of the lesson come out from the text rather than trying to shoehorn a text into an approach, new ways of doing stuff come out all the time. I like to think of it as a version of modernist sculptors and architects being true to their materials. Here is what came out when playing around with some recent Guardian news lessons:

Body image concerns more men than women

Doctors back denial of treatment for smokers and the obese

Hopefully the introduction makes it clear that I’m not making any claims for the lessons above, I just think believe that a process of continuous experimentation in the hope that it throws out a better way of doing things is the way to improve all our lessons and letting the texts suggest the methods is an easy way of making that happen.