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A TEACHER GUIDE TO USING NEWSPAPERS
IN THE CLASSROOM
Economic and technological developments are increasingly having more and
more impact on our social lives. Over the last few years the media, and
especially information technologies, have developed incredibly fast. Magazines
and newspapers, computer and internet have all become an integral part of young
people's lives.
Newspapers can be found everywhere. It's impossible to avoid being
" informed" all the time. Wherever we go, we are followed by some
kind of news. You can hardly find another resource, except newspaper, that
reflects changes in language and society so quickly. We are all - but in
particular the younger generation - expected to be newspaper competent. An
education and training which doesn't take knowledge of newspaper into
consideration fails our students.
There are so many good reasons to use the news to teach. Reading the
newspaper helps students become better spellers, have larger vocabularies and
have higher achievement scores in social studies, language and mathematics than
their matched counterparts who relied only on textbooks.
Newspaper use seems to improve
verbal interactions, student motivation and student behavior.
This article aims to show some useful activities that can become your
teaching guide to using newspapers in the class.
I have put together a list of some Dos and Don’ts that we adhere to when using
newspapers in class. Read them and decide for yourself whether you agree or
not. Then perhaps you can try some of the ideas I include that follow.
Newspaper DOs and DON’Ts
Do...
·
Use English language
newspapers produced for the local community if you are teaching in a country
where English is not an official language. Many large cities will have a
newspaper in English. The topics within these papers are likely to have more of
an impact on the learners than topics that are specific to the British or
American press.
·
Allow learners to select an
article that interests them, work on it and report back to other learners.
·
Be clear on aims. Is it
reading or speaking you want to practice? Or both?
·
Get learners to read outside
class as much as possible.
·
Make your tasks as authentic
as the material. Tasks like “underline all the verbs in the past” are of
limited value and should be used sparingly. Think about what people do when
they read newspapers in their own language.
·
Help learners to become better
learners. Reading is a great way of acquiring language. If you can get your
learners to regularly dip into English newspapers then their reading skills,
writing skills and vocabulary will improve. Talk about reading and
comprehension of English texts with your learners as well, and share strategies
that they use when reading. How often do they use a dictionary for example? At
the end of a course, do they feel they are reading faster or better?
Don’t...
·
Assume learners are interested
in British, American, Canadian or Australian culture, particularly tabloid
gossip. The British tabloids, for example, are a culturally specific type of newspaper
and are not universal.
·
Assume what you find
interesting in a newspaper will interest your learners.
·
Set simple tasks for lower
level learners with a very difficult piece of text, e.g. Find three numbers and
two countries in this 3 column article on the Middle East. Unless these tasks
are followed up with an opportunity to comprehend and interact with the text,
they’re condescending and (almost) pointless.
Ideas on how to use newspapers
The following are a list of ideas on how to use a newspaper authentically
in the classroom. Of course, old habits can die hard, so you can include some other classroom type activities
that you like as well.
Writing Activities
1. Some newspaper
have a section where readers write questions and other readers answer
them. Here is an example:
Set up a Q and A board in your classroom. Every week
ask 3 or 4 learners to submit a question for the board. You can set a theme
(e.g. sports questions, grammar questions, movie questions) or leave it open.
Check the questions for accuracy and post them up. During the week ask other
learners to look at the questions (as they arrive in class, just before the end
of class, if they finish early) and try write a response to one of them. They
should post their answers under the relevant question.
2. In some newspapers, there is a news summary section consisting of many
short news items (one paragraph each). Give each pair of learners one of these
news items and ask them to write a headline for it on a separate slip of paper.
Collect all the stories and the headlines. Post them on the board or put them
on a table and ask learners to match the stories and the headlines.
3. Ask learners to choose a short item
of news that they find interesting and rewrite it, changing some of the
details. Have learners exchange news items with a partner and see if they can
spot the lies.
4. This activity is good for working on descriptive writing. Provide each
student with a newspaper and have them cut out pictures and their captions.
When they are finished, divide the students into pairs. Students will swap
pictures, but not captions. Students must write a caption to accompany their
new picture based on what they see and what they think is happening in the
picture. When they are finished, the pairs can take turns showing one another
their pictures and reading their new captions. Have them read the original
captions to compare.
6. This activity works best with a Sunday newspaper, as it has more
sections. Divide the newspaper up by section and split students into small
groups, each with a different section. As a group, students choose one article
and write a summary of that article together. When all groups are finished,
each group takes a turn reading their summary. The other groups have to guess
which section the article was from (Sports, Business, Front Page) before taking
their own turn.
Speaking
activities
1. Cut out some
photos from the newspaper of recent news items which are familiar/ relevant/ of
interest to your learners. Put the learners in pairs. Demonstrate the activity
by holding up a picture and doing the following:
·
Describe what is in the
picture (there is… there are… a man is talking… two women are walking….)
·
Speculate about what the news
story could be (it could be… it must be… he might be…)
Ask learners to do the same with their picture in
pairs. As a follow up they could write the caption for the photo on a separate
piece of paper. Collect the captions and photos. Redistribute them to the
learners, who now have to find the photo to match the caption.
2. You can always use newspapers as a prompt to start a discussion on a given
topic. Just as you would show a picture of something to prompt discussion, do
the same with a newspaper article. If your aim is discussion and speaking
skills, then why not use a newspaper written in the learners’ L1 to prompt
discussion? Learners will be able to skim an article much quicker in their own
language, especially at lower levels. If it is an issue that is local (and
therefore unlikely to be covered in an English newspaper), then all the more reason
to do so.
A variation of this would be to ask the learner to
read something from the newspaper in their own language and explain it to you
in English.
3. You can use a newspaper in class without learners having to read it at all.
For some role play speaking activities give out props. For fidgety learners,
having something to hold while they are speaking can help!For example, role
play a conversation between two people over a coffee in the morning. To help
them get started, give them the following options to start a conversation:
A (reading a newspaper) – Can
you BELIEVE this?
B – What is it?
A – This is an outrage. Listen to
this…
A – Are you listening to me?
B (reading a newspaper) – Hmmmm?
A – I was saying…
4. Choose an interesting article or story from the newspaper and make enough
copies for every pair of learners. There are often “human interest” stories in
the newspaper which adapt themselves well to role play (“Man finds long lost
brother”; “Lottery winner buys a house for pet dog” etc.). Ask learners to
first read the newspaper and then improvise a short role play. Role plays from
newspapers are often conducted one of two ways: 1) one learner plays the
journalist and the other plays the protagonist of the story; the journalists
does an interview, or 2) learners each take the role of a person in the story
and act out the story, or something that happens before or after the story.
5.Have students find a photograph in the newspaper that interests them.
Instruct them to think about what is going on in the picture. Have them explain
what they think happened just before the picture was taken and predict what
they believe will happen afterwards. They should write down their explanation.
Then, for creative writing fun, have them come up with the wildest events they
can think of for what happened before and after.
6.Explain the structure of each article. Students should
understand that in a newspaper, the main idea is often the first sentence of
the article, which explains the "who, what, when, why and how" of the
story. The rest of the article develops the details. Newspaper articles are
nonfiction and are therefore not written with developed characters, setting or
plot. Ask students to underline the first sentence of many articles and then
highlight the "who, what, when, where and how."
Reading activities
1. Distribute the newspapers, one for each group of two or three learners.
Tell them they have a time limit with which to skim through the newspaper. When
the time limit is up, ask two groups to get together and report to each other
everything they remember that is in the news. They must do this in English, and
cannot refer to the newspapers. Do feedback as a whole group. This is a
combined reading and speaking activity, although the time limit forces learners
to use the reading skill of skimming.
2.Give each learner a newspaper and tell them that for homework, you would
like them to take the newspaper home, choose an article and prepare a report on
it to classmates. The report must be no longer than five minutes, and should
include peer teaching on new vocabulary that the learner encounters in their
article. This encourages reading outside the classroom, as well as dictionary
use. Set up a schedule and have the last five minutes of every class devoted to
news reports by a learner or learners and make this project part of your class
routine.
3.Give each group of four or five learners a newspaper and a piece of paper.
Tell them that they have ten minutes to make a quiz based on that section of
the newspaper. Suggest different kinds of questions, e.g. How long has X been…
Where is …? How many people…? What happened in …? Who is…? Who won…? How much
did…pay/cost…?
In groups, learners write six questions. Circulate and
monitor, checking the grammar and spelling in the questions (and making sure
that questions are not too difficult!)
When the groups are finished, they pass the paper and
the questions to another group. Set a time limit for new groups to do the quiz.
Repeat the process if you have time. Do feedback and check the answers to the
quizzes. This is good to practice the reading skill of scanning for
information.
4. If you have introduced the skill of summarizing, have students read
short articles and work in pairs or small groups. Each student can read a paragraph
and highlight the important details. Then they can paraphrase these details
into sentences that best retell the event related in the article.
5. Discuss the relevance of a news story. Students should understand that
for an article to be "news," it must be timely, relevant and
nonjudgmental. Teach words such as "fair," "accurate,"
"authentic" and "accessible." To illustrate this concept,
ask students to read two or three news stories from various papers. Ask them to
rate the fairness, accuracy -- how do we know it's true? -- and accessibility
-- is it easy to understand? -- on a 1-to-5 scale. Students can discuss their
findings in small groups.
6. Use
newspapers to teach current events. Newspapers are a great way to learn about
what is going on in your region, country, or world. Choose one article every
morning and have the students read it aloud to the class. Depending on the age
of your students, you could choose a controversial article and make the
students discuss it.
Finally, I would like to say that teaching with newspapers develops
skills and approaches that can lead to more effective learning. Using newspaper
in the classroom follows a comprehensive study skills syllabus covering
metacognitive strategies (thinking about, planning and evaluating learning) and
affective and social strategies (monitoring your attitude to learning and
working with others) as well as dictionary and reference skills. It also
develops specific strategies for learning and practicing listening, speaking,
reading, writing, vocabulary and grammar more effectively. All students are
different and my experience suggests that effective working with newspaper
depends on choosing the right strategy, or combination of strategies, for the
task, the learning context, or the particular individual.
Importance of choosing the right methodology about newspaper is the
guarantee of students future interests in periodicals, and as regards teachers,
it will help to keep their lessons not only more efficient but also more
motivated, as well as to provide a valuable extra practice opportunity both in
and out of class.