How Rumours Travel Through a Forest
Grammar: Hedging language — epistemic modality, gradience in certainty, and precision in claims
A Level 6 English lesson exploring science.
What's in this lesson
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL lesson on science, practising hedging language — epistemic modality, gradience in certainty, and precision in claims. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary and discussion questions.
From the reading: How Rumours Travel Through a Forest
Beneath almost every forest floor lies a network so vast and so intricate that scientists are only beginning to understand what it does. Fungal threads, thinner than a human hair, connect the roots of trees across hundreds of square metres, passing what appears to be chemical information — warnings about insect attacks, distress signals from drought-stressed neighbours, and, in what may constitute a form of resource sharing, streams of carbon and phosphorus. Whether this constitutes genuine communication remains genuinely contested; yet the parallel with human information networks is difficult to dismiss.
Vocabulary
- amplify by
- dismiss as
- spread through
- strip away
- as far as we know
- broadly speaking
- in all likelihood
- it is worth noting that
- to a certain extent
- up to a point
Discussion questions
- Do you trust the first version of a story you hear?
- What makes a piece of news feel instantly credible?
- Is speed of information always an advantage?
How Rumours Travel Through a Forest
Grammar: Hedging language — epistemic modality, gradience in certainty, and precision in claims
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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