It is easy to complain about how celebrity culture can be an unhealthy influence on young people. The world is full of “superstars” whose behavior is not what we want our students or our children to emulate—to say nothing of their grammar. But I recently read about a teacher in Brazil who turned bad-celebrity-grammar into an example of both creative teaching and teaching for creativity. Students certainly had a chance to look at their world in a new way!
Led by team leader Andrea Baena, students studying English at the Red Balloon School were challenged to follow their favorite celebrities’ Twitter feeds and identify grammatical errors. They then responded to the ungrammatical tweets with fan-praise and grammatical corrections. Take a look.
While I’ll admit that not every celebrity post is school-suitable, correcting celebrity tweets has to be the most innovative grammar exercise I’ve heard in a long time. If your students give it a try, send some examples. We’d love to see them!
creativiteach 