Expanding headlines

Newspaper headlines are often not full sentences, but they are nevertheless quite easy to make sense of. In this starter, students will use their implicit knowledge of grammar to expand newspaper headlines into complete sentences, and then explicitly analyse what they've done. The Activity slide show appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. In the Activity slide show, five example headlines are presented. Students should do the following:

Newspaper headlines often use very compressed language, as in the following example:

This could be expanded into the following, adding as few words as possible: 

One example of a more detailed, longer sentence might be the following (though there are many other possibilities too):

The above sentence does not use the phrase after a crash, but instead gives details of the crash.

Students should generate a short sentence and a longer, detailed sentence for each headline. Then, they should ask what they notice about the words that have been added. What kinds of words are they? What functions do they serve? 

Discussion

In this exercise, we look at the roles played by different kinds of words. It can be useful here to think about a contrast between content words and grammatical words.

Content words have the kind of full meaning content that can be described separately, like crash, guilty or block. The meanings of grammatical words are often harder to pin down. They are words like a, of or and which function mainly to express quite general grammatical meanings or relationships.

The words left out of headlines are often grammatical words, so you are likely to have added this kind of word in your short expansions. In your longer expansions, you are likely to have added some further content words as well.

Sometimes content words are also left out of headlines, if they are easily predictable from the context.

For instance, the first example was Pakistani PM guilty of contempt. Here you are likely to have added some form of the verb find, as in the following expansions:

In this instance the meanings of the other elements in the headline make it easy to supply the missing verb.

In some cases it is quite difficult to understand a headline, unless you already know something about the situation. Take the following example:

Here the noun phrase Terry handshake is unusual. If we don’t know the situation, we can only conclude it’s something to do with Terry and a handshake. To find out more, we need to read on.

Here is the first paragraph of the story:

Unusual noun phrases like Terry handshake are quite commonly used in headlines as a way of compressing information. See if you can find some more examples from newspapers.

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Expanding headlines: Activity

  1. Lorry driver cut free after crash
  2. Pakistani PM guilty of contempt
  3. Calls to block £14bn EU bill
  4. Time called on noisy church bells
  5. Australian billionaire to build Titanic II
  6. Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy
  7. Cops halt doughnut shop robbery

 

Welcome!

Englicious is totally free for everyone to use!

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If you’ve already registered, you can log in straight away.

Since this is your first visit today, you can see this page by clicking the button below.

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