Target Level: A1-A2
Description:
How might instructors incorporate information about increasing global temperatures into German lessons? With the increasing frequency of heatwaves and temperature records, online media report on the hottest days on record and compare local temperatures with places known to have warmer weather. This provides an opportunity for students to encounter comparative and superlative structures in authentic material while also considered the lived reality of life on a warming planet.
Methods and Approaches:
When students learn comparative and superlative forms, the instructor can provide a number of news headlines about the hottest day of the year or show forecasts predicting warmer weather. Students either fill in endings to blanked-out headlines or mine the text for comparative and superlative phrases.
The instructor then displays a map listing different daily temperatures around the world and asks students to write sentences comparing temperatures in Berlin with those in Barcelona, for example. Students can also compare annual average temperatures displayed on a graph, writing sentences about the differences they notice.
The following webpages have headlines that use comparative and superlative structures from the record-breaking heatwave in summer 2019:
- Berliner Morgenpost: “Heißester Tag in Berlin mit Juni-Rekord”
- muenchen.de: “Hitze in München: Die heißeste Woche des Jahres”
- Statista: “Höchste je gemessene Temperaturen (in °C) in ausgewählten Orten in Deutschland”