This lesson for advanced students focuses on advanced vocabulary, reading comprehension, and speaking skills. Students will read a news story about how a piece of fake news disrupted the financial markets and explore the driving forces behind fake news.
Image credit: hartonocreativestudio
For anyone interested in current affairs, financial markets, and politics, knowing how to distinguish fake news from real news is key. With artificial intelligence wreaking havoc across the internet, this theme is as topical and ever-green as ever.
I was originally inspired to create this lesson because of my student’s love of politics, and by this free Eng Hub Pro resource which I found during my research. The lesson is based on an authentic material: CNN’s article ‘How actual ‘fake news’ caused a market whiplash’. Although the article concerns a specific event that happened in April, 2025, its main idea (‘a very expensive lesson in accurate and reliable reporting’) is always relevant, as markets and other areas of public life are always susceptible to misinformation.
Although I originally taught this lesson online to one student, it’s been adapted for a classroom setting with multiple students.
Which students is this fake news ESL lesson best suited to?
Upper-intermediate and advanced adult learners. Although it could possibly suit some teenage learners with specific interests, it’s generally assumed that learners of this age may not yet have the life experience and knowledge needed to discuss this topic as fully as it could be.
How to teach this ESL lesson: Fake News
Here’s a general overview of the lesson plan (detailed fully in the downloadable PDF at the bottom of this post):
- Warm-up discussion: students discuss a few questions related to fake news in pairs (10 minutes)
- Reading: students read the article (5 minutes)
- Reading comprehension and discussion: students discuss the text (5 minutes)
- Focus on vocabulary: students match bolded terms from the text with their definitions in pairs (10 minutes).
- Discussion using vocabulary in context: in a series of questions, students use the vocabulary they’ve just learned in a wider discussion about news, fake news and its consequences (15 minutes).
- Find fake news! Students search for and discuss examples of fake news articles using their mobile phones or laptops.
The vocabulary in focus for this esl lesson for advanced students is: reprieve, errant, surge, baffled, turnaround, regurgitate, amplify.
Although these words are the primary focus of this lesson, there is lots of other advanced vocabulary in the text, including phrasal verbs such as ‘break out’, ‘make up’, and ‘take over’.
An example of one of the slides using the vocabulary (to ‘amplify’ something) in context.
The takeaway
The combination of an ever-evolving and constantly shifting digital landscape, the rise of AI-generated deepfakes and other elements of misinformation, and world leaders which increasingly shun the truth in favor of sensationalism mean the ‘fake news’ topic will always be relevant. Whether it’s through this lesson or one of the many other fake news esl lessons out there (see ESL Brains, One Stop English and Lingua House), you will arm your students with an enhanced ability to think critically about the news they consume, and give them the language to discuss it in English.