 Newspapers
have long been a useful and popular source of authentic materials
for language classrooms. They have the advantage of being both readily
available and up to date, all the more so since the advent of easily
accessible online news services. However, with so much material
to choose from, selecting the right article, story or newspaper
for your class can be difficult.
Following are a number of activities that you can use with your
adult students to help them to get the most out of English language
newspapers. These minimal-preparation activities can be used again
and again with a range of different articles and class types. The
only materials you need are newspapers!
ACTIVITY 1
Keeping up with the news
If you are going to use newspapers as a regular classroom resource,
it is worth investing some classroom time in an ‘interest analysis’
to gauge your students’ interest in the news.
Here is a suggestion for a discussion activity which can be used
both as an interest analysis and as an introduction to the topic
of the news. These discussion questions focus on the different ways
people keep up with the news.
- How often do you:
a) read the news in a paper or on the Internet?
b) watch the news on TV?
c) listen to the news on the radio?
- Do you receive email news digests?
- When was the last time you heard/read/saw the news? Was it in
your own language or in English?
- What story interested you most?
- What kind of stories usually interest you most?
Ask students to discuss these questions in small groups. To focus
the discussion and encourage the students to listen to each other
carefully, ask them to decide who in their group is most ‘up
on the news’. Each group is then given a newspaper (local
or foreign, in the students’ L1 or in English) and asked
to choose three stories that they think might interest the class.
The groups then present the stories they have chosen and the class
vote on the ones they want to know more about.
Extension
1. As a lead-in to the discussion you may want to ask your students
to write a definition of news using no more than 15 words. The students
first work in pairs and then as a whole class to decide on the best
definition. The students may be interested in comparing their class
definition with a dictionary definition:
- information about a recently changed situation or a recent event
(The Cobuild Learner’s Dictionary)
- fresh information about something that has recently taken place
(Webster’s)
You may want to draw your students’ attention to the difference
between news and the news.
2. As a follow-up activity outside class, students could find out
more about one of the stories and share this information with their
classmates at the beginning of the next lesson.
ACTIVITY 2
Instant reactions
Choose a news story that you think will provoke a reaction from
your students. Introduce the topic of the article, encouraging some
initial discussion and then establish a reader response code. The
code will depend on the nature of the article. For example, with
a local news story or event, the response code could include:
! = I didn’t know that.
? = Is that really true?
J = I agree.
L = I don’t agree.
You may also want to include a symbol for ‘I don’t understand’,
which you can use later to follow up on any language problems.
Students may take some time to get used to using reader response
codes. The first time you use one, read through the article yourself
at the same time as your students, making notes of your responses
as you read. When everyone has finished reading, show your annotated
text to the class (without going into any detail yet as to your
responses) and then give the class a few minutes to check, or complete,
their notes (some students invariably will have forgotten to make
a note of their responses on the first reading).
The discussion which follows as students compare their responses
can often bring up ideas and angles that a prewritten set of questions
easily might have missed, as each reader brings something new to
the text.
ACTIVITY 3
Question time
Choose a short news report with an intriguing headline and/or photo.
Ask the students to work in pairs to guess what the story is about
and to prepare three questions they’d like to ask you about
it. The students use your answers to write a summary of the story.
They then read each other’s stories and redraft their own,
adding to the story or changing it as they see fit. The peer reading
stage encourages students to self-correct when redrafting and makes
them more aware of style and audience. They then read the original
news report and compare it with their own version.
Extension
Once they have dealt with differences in the contents, encourage
them to look at the style, grammar and vocabulary used and ask each
pair to give feedback on any points of interest. You may want to
follow up on some of these points in later classes.
ACTIVITY 4
News in brief
Choose four or five short news stories, for example from the ‘News
in brief’ section on the front page of a newspaper, or on the
home page of a Web site. Cut up the stories and hand one out to
each student. With a large class, ask students to work in large
groups and duplicate the stories for each group. The students read
and memorise their story, hand back the texts and then mingle, exchanging
news stories with their classmates.
When all of the students have heard all the stories, ask them to
work in pairs to recall as many of the stories as possible. Check
back with the whole class and then ask the students to prepare a
transcript for the radio news. Give a limit of 30 words for each
story.
You may want to use the finished texts as the basis for a noticing
exercise, with the students comparing their versions with the originals
and then noticing the use of certain grammar points (present perfect,
passive, definite articles, and so on) or points of style (such
as hedging, summarising or expressing an opinion).
Extension
Record the students reading out their news digest. Each member of
the group can read out a different item. You may want to do some
work on sentence stress and intonation before they tape themselves.
A recording of a short radio bulletin can provide a useful model
(the BBC News Web site is a good source for up-to-date news bulletins).
ACTIVITY 5
Calling the experts
Choose an article or a news story from the local press in your students’
L1. If you don’t speak your students’ language then choose
a story with an intriguing photo. If you speak the language well,
choose a story which requires a lot of background cultural knowledge.
Explain to your students that you’ve seen this story but don’t
really understand it and would like them to explain it to you. Give
them a copy of the article in small groups and ask them to decide
how they are going to explain the story to you. Discourage word
for word translation of the story, encouraging paraphrasing and
summarising.
The groups then work together to explain the story to you. Play
dumb and ask as many questions as seems fit in order to encourage
discussion. Once the discussion has run out of steam, go over any
new vocabulary that has come up and ask the students to write a
short report of the story in English.
Rationale
Paraphrasing and explaining a local news story in a foreign language
is a challenging task. It involves rapid code switching, finding
translations and paraphrases for idiomatic expressions and explaining
cultural references. The challenge for the teacher is to motivate
the class to rise to this challenge, to see its relevance as a real-life
task, one which they might find themselves having to perform.
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