Newspapers - A powerful tool in English Language Teaching

Rohana ANDARAWEERA
 

The fact cannot be denied that today English has evolved, from its beginning to be the lingua franca of all fields of work. The need of having a major focus on English education is therefore of paramount importance. Now English education has become the main thrust in our education system.

Revolutionary changes are taking place in order to improve the quality of teaching English in schools. Modern technology too has slowly crept into the classroom teaching. However we cannot solely depend on the high tech which is only accessible to very limited number of schools. We should exploit whatever resources available in our schools and make the best use of them.

There is no teaching aid other than the newspaper for the teacher to facilitate his teaching. Newspapers as the cheapest and most readily available material in a school provide teachers enormous amount of text and information for a large sources of langauge activities which can be used in the classroom.

The teacher has to select the most appropriate material according to the aim of the activity and the langauge level of his learners. In our remote schools, the teacher has to be extremely resourceful and the newspapers are immensely helpful for him in the English classroom. The creative teacher uses the newspaper as a very powerful tool in his classroom teaching.

Newspapers provide an excellent opportunity for teachers to develop learners’; interest in reading and cultivate the reading habit of their learners. Reading a newspaper is the foremost activity of many in spite of the busy schedule of work. The latest news of the newspaper helps the most to initiate an effective communication with the others during the day. The teacher too can begin his class lively by eliciting any topic of news from the class. The responses provided by the learners help the teacher lead a discussion with the whole class for few minutes to create a friendly learning environment in the classroom.

The discussion can be based on the learners’ own interests. Initially the learners with the elementary proficiency in English can join the discussion in the mother tongue and the teacher could help them introducing the necessary new vocabulary. Reading aloud is an indispensable tool of langauge learning though most widely condemned by language teaching experts. It is a good way of practising aspects of spoken langauge as pronunciation, and stress and intonation.

vocabulary

Headlines, news, reports, feature articles, interviews, announcements notices, obituaries and poems in the poetry corner can be used to practise these skills. Expanding new vocabulary is essential for the effective communication and newspapers help us immensely here. News items on various topics including sports, entertainment, culture, health, education, etc can be used effectively to develop vocabulary of learners. The crossword puzzles help children reinforce and enrich vocabulary.

In vocabulary lessons teacher can read a headlines of a news item and elicit learners’ already existing background knowledge and related vocabulary. Apart from enlarging their vocabulary, various activities can be designed to practise the skill of guessing the meaning of unknown words from the context. Learners can be encouraged to look up key words in their dictionaries in order to find an appropriate definition, synonym, or antonym. The sentences in which the key words re-included can be written on the blackboard to highlight the ‘word profile’ (definition, part of speech, connotations, derivatives) of the key vocabulary.

Comprehension questions, finding the main ideas, matching headlines with the news passages, and summarising, are very few activities which can be used to develop the reading sub skills. “Beheading” is an interesting activity can be done even with an old newspaper.

news reports/stories

Teacher selects news reports/stories which interest the children greatly and cut off the headlines and news reports into paragraphs to be distributed randomly to the learners. Each learner reads out his headline or the paragraph to the class. Members carrying the different parts of the same news item and its headline form the group and make the original news report.

Writing is a necessity in life. Newspapers provide an excellent opportunity for teachers to develop learners’ interest in writing. Imitation is an important factor in learning to write. Newspapers are replete with various writing text types which can be analysed to make students expose to different styles of writing and choice of words. Learners can be encouraged to overcome their deeply rooted fear of using the target language by helping them to do parallel writing with these text types and they indeed serve as models to imitate.

The content of a news report can be exploited to teach students how to report about some one or some thing. Headlines or pictures can be used to make up a story to fit them. Each group can be given the first sentence of a news item chosen by the teacher to write the supporting sentences and concluding sentences. They can be motivated by giving them to challenge to write the most vocabulary of the original news item to win the competition.

If the newspaper article has charts, graphs, or figures that are easy to decipher without reading the article, the students can be asked to examine those visuals in order to discover the main idea(s) of the article. Helping learners to connect language to express their personal needs is a great way for teachers to begin addressing the motivation issue in their classroom. Getting them to respond to pen pals corner, encourage them to send their entries to the various competitions published in the newspaper and writing short stories and articles to the children’s page in the newspaper are few activities which can be easily practice in the classroom. Advertisements of newspaper provide much fun and arouse a great deal of interest among learners of English.

advertisements

The slogans in the advertisements an help the teacher illustrate the grammatical elements, rules, idioms, witty language and many other expressions. Coloured advertisements cut from the newspapers can be glued onto a cardboard and displayed in the classroom for the regular use with the learners at various levels of language competence. The creative teacher profits greatly from designing interesting activities using the slogans in the advertisements.

Simple sentences and short paragraphs can be developed on slogans. The whole class can be converted into business group and encourage them to produce most convincing and tempting slogans for the products and organise an exhibition of advertisements.

The pictures of faces in the newspaper can be employed to encourage learners to decide about the person’s age, nationality, marital status, occupation and other important information and get them to work out a short biography.

The skill of writing letters has become vitally important in the modern society. Letters to the editor help learners study different styles of writing and various functions.

‘The employment opportunity’ can be used to give learners a practical guide in writing letters of applications for the advertised posts.

Newspapers can be effectively employed to practise speaking activities. The students can give speeches about the news items or articles they have read. The speaking skills can be developed through a class discussion on an interesting issue in the newspaper. Most fluency activities can be practice in groups.

informal discussions

A collection of pictures in newspapers could be a great resource to enhance the fluency of speaking through informal discussions, discussing various interpretations on the pictures, building up dialogues and enacting them in the class, debates etc.

Groups can create different stories on a picture given with a situation. The idea that there can be many stories, facilitates the learners’ use of English freely. The folk stories too can be used to device many speaking activities for learners to use English appropriately and accurately.

The teacher may read only the part of the story and encourage the learners to use their imagination to come up with possible ending for the story.

Learners interaction can be promoted through group activities by acting out the interesting parts of the story. Narrating stories not only displays the latent talents of students but also adds fun to the language class. More interest and enthusiasm can be generated in a class competition by awarding the best raconteur.

Sort dialogues can be formed and practised based on TV programmes, the weather forecast, sports diary and classified advertisements. Students can practise the interrogative form in producing short dialogues such as

What time is news on BBC?

Where will they play the second test match?

What is the weather like on the southern coast?

Weather reports can give learners valuable opportunities to practice giving advice and warning. Father tires to convince his son not to go out on the planned trip because of bad weather.

Grammar is always looked upon as an essential but seems to be a very boring part in both teaching and learning.

Finding materials other than the textbooks is the major problem confronting any teacher in teaching grammar. The teachers exploiting the high potentials of newspapers in classroom teaching consciously attempt to avoid boredom of teaching grammar. The headlines of newspapers can be effectively used to practise tense and voice of verbs. Weather forecast reports illustrate tenses of verbs and prepositions of place and time. Predictions of zodiac signs can be used to practise future tense and modal verbs. Classified advertisements provide authentic information for learners to use comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.

The test is an integrative testing instrument that measures overall language competence. Newspapers provide the teacher with several passages on different subject matters which can be adapted to use in tests.

The teacher can do a number of activities in the langauge class using newspapers and they bring variety to the lesson and remove the shackles of routine. Using newspapers will highlight the status of English by showing the usefulness of learning English as the global language which is used in all fields of work. The newspapers therefore play a key role in motivating the learners to learn English. Through my own experiences in teaching English, I have found that newspaper is a tremendous resource to teach English effectively and the possibilities for using it in the language class endless.