Fighting Fake News in the EFL-classroom through "The Bad News Game". Potential and Challenges (PDF)

Lesson Plan from the year 2022 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Miscellaneous, grade: 11, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), course: Fake News, Disinformaton and Critical Discourse Competence in the EFLC, language: English, abstract: This term paper seeks to investigate to what extent "The Bad News Game" is suitable to sensitize students to fake news and disinformation on the Internet through the presentation of a teaching unit consisting of one double lesson. The first part of the term paper addresses three empirical studies with a respective distance of one year, which deal with the game and its effect on the players. Afterwards, the theoretical second part will focus on the potentials and challenges in the EFL classroom, which serves as a transition to the teaching unit. The teaching unit will present a possible lesson design for English classes, developed with the core curriculum for the upper secondary school English lessons of the Hessian Ministry of Education in mind. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the results of the chapters.

"The Bad News Game" is an excellent choice for the classroom, as it addresses crucial manipulation techniques, and is well suited as a discussion starter to strengthen students' media literacy. Besides, it improves resistance to disinformation, making it a good introduction to the complex topic. The students' awareness for fake news and disinformation on the Internet can be raised with the help of interactive and narrative elements, that occur in the game, and encourage constructive discussion. The teaching unit, which comprises a total of 1 double lesson, serves to introduce the topic of fake news and disinformation and to get to know the prevailing problem as well as the linguistic characteristics. In addition, it is interesting to find out how students define fake news and whether they have encountered them before.