(and many teachers) maintain files of articles organized thematically or on the basis of their language content. (And which of us has not been rescued from lack of preparation by the providential article culled fresh from the morning newspaper?)
Language learners find newspapers motivating because they offer interesting, relevant, topical, and varied information. Equally importantly, for many, they provide one of the more obvious keys for opening up the foreign society, its preoccupations, its habitual ways of thought, and its prejudices. For these very reasons newspaper material is among the most challenging the learner is called upon to face.
Language teachers tend to use newspapers in three ways: to develop various language competencies, including reading comprehension and grammar/vocabulary work; to focus on aspects of the target society and its culture; and to stimulate discussion of issues raised by the articles.
This book, while not neglecting any of these areas, concentrates on developing an authentic response from the learners. The activities are aimed at helping learners to read newspapers as newspapers, and to react to them as real people. (See especially Chapter 6, ‘Personal responses’.) All too often the newspaper article has been treated as an object for linguistic or cultural dissection and analysis. Such practices can lead to the teacher continuing to squeeze the text dry long after the sap of genuine interest has been savoured by the learners.
One of the major problems in incorporating newspaper material in books is loss of topicality. An ephemeral medium is frozen into a kind of permanence, and is rapidly perceived as dated. This book has relatively few re-printed articles. Instead it offers a very wide range of highly creative and original activities which could be applied to almost any article or extract. In this way, it provides teachers with a valuable resource for using the articles of their own choice.
Introduction
‘British newspapers are something else,’ as a friend from overseas said to me recently. I suppose he meant that the popular Press in Britain contains little news, preferring instead the ‘human interest’ story. And of course he was also being mildly critical. But it is very doubtful whether this image of the British Press as ‘something else’ is shared by those unfortunate language learners who have been fed on a diet of inscrutable headlines (‘Left in the dark over racism’, etc.), boring materials from ‘quality’ newspapers, and interminable ‘comprehension’ passages. This book champions a quite different approach to the use of newspapers in English Language Teaching, an approach which, broadly speaking, puts the learner’s interests first and the newspaper materials second.
The overall aim of this book is to provide a range of original, practical ideas for working with newspapers. Original and practical because that is what teachers want, and newspapers because when one has learnt to read a newspaper in a foreign language, one begins to feel that one has gone some way towards learning the second language successfully. The ultimate aim of the book is to give the students the confidence to buy and read English-language newspapers for themselves.
In the classroom, the aim is to get students first reading newspapers and then working with what they have found in their reading. In the activities in this book, ‘reading’ usually involves looking for something specific; and ‘working with what they have found in their reading’ may mean anything from making a collage to crossing out what is distasteful.
A second methodological aim is to get the students to teach themselves, as far as possible, by giving them authentic, involving activities to work on, usually in pairs and small groups.
A third, wider aim is to provide access to an important source of information, which also, in English-speaking countries, reflects significant cultural and political attitudes.
To sum up: Although this is a resource book in the obvious sense that it contains lots of practical, newspaper-based classroom activities, its underlying purpose is not only to provide teaching resources of this kind, but also to give students practice in the skills needed to enable them to read English-language newspapers for themselves.
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