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Reading and speaking: Twitter joke

READING AND SPEAKING: British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter joke’

AIMS: For students to practise reading and speaking and to revise vocabulary and grammar they have learnt this term 


SKILL FOCUS: reading and speaking

TIME: 45 minutes


MATERIALS: handout

CLASS INTERACTION: pairwork and groupwork (groups of 3/4 students)



1.  Ask students a few questions about the Internet and social networking sites they use.

  1. What do you usually do on the Net?
  2. What social networking sites do you usually use? Why?
  3. Have you ever used Twitter?
  4. What do you know about Twitter?
  5. Do you find the warning sign funny? Why? Why not?

2. Pairwork – Before reading the story about a pair of British tourists Leigh and Emily, ask students to read the prompts in order to predict what happened in the story.

Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting / British tourists / trip to Los Angeles / airport / passport control / security officials / arrested / terrorist / excited tweet / destroy America / commit crime / passports and bags confiscated


3. Ask Ss to read the text ‘British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter joke’ to find out what really happened and whether their predictions are right or wrong. 


4. Students read the text once again in order to find out if the sentences are true (T) or false (F).

5. Ask students to match the sentence on the left with a sentence with the same meaning on the right.


6. Groupwork – Ask Ss to do the crossword.

7. Aviation English vocabulary  –  Ask students to match the word with its meaning.


8. Ask Ss to summarise the story in a few sentences.

  1. Why were Leigh and Emily arrested at Los Angeles airport?
  2. How long were they detained by the US guards?
  3. What did the US officials suspect them of planning to do?
  4. What did the US officials do to the British pair?


9. Group discussionHave you or someone you know ever had an unpleasant experience at an airport?

Twitter joke_for students

Twitter joke_lesson plan


About ljiljana havran


2 responses »

  1. Excellent lesson plan. Thanks for sharing! 🙂


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