Chapter 20
Read All About It! Focusing on the News
In This Chapter
Understanding why news is relevant and engaging for students of EFL
Using the news with a wide variety of students
Summarising the day’s news in an advanced lesson plan
In all corners of the globe, news is available in one form or another. For instance there are 24-hour rolling news channels, radio bulletins, in-depth analyses, and investigations by newspaper journalists. This provides a constant stream of lesson content which is interesting, varied and helps students increase culture awareness. In addition, the same news stories are presented in different ways so there are many opportunities to compare language usage.
In this chapter, I show you how to take advantage of the news and current affairs to create lessons that connect the classroom environment with everyday events in the outside world. I include a lesson plan for advanced students that gets them summarising and discussing several articles from the same newspaper and extending their vocabulary in the process.
Using the News as Lesson Content
There are many reasons to use the news as a resource in lesson planning. However, some teachers shy away from using it because, as they say, ‘Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper!’ They protest that it isn’t easy to re-use a news-based lesson because the story involved ceases to be relevant within a short time. Although this may be true, the advantages of incorporating current news outweigh any drawbacks.
Here are some compelling reasons to explore the news with your students:
- Using news stories involves authentic and current reading/listening material, rather than specially designed EFL resources. This is very motivating for students because they feel they have progressed well when they can use the same resources as native speakers.
- Material is ready to use. If you’re in an English-speaking city, you may not even have to photocopy stories. Londoners, for example, have access to at least two free newspapers per weekday and many free magazines, so you only need to grab a pile of them and give them out to students.
- Studying news items increases cultural awareness. It shows what’s of concern to a particular nation and reveals public opinion.
- News stories cover a broad range of interests.
- Reading/listening for gist, detail, and inferred meaning are just some of the many important sub-skills you can practise in news-based lessons.
- The news facilitates comparison, which is a great basis for discussion and essays. Students can compare fact and opinion, or tabloid versus broadsheet styles of reporting.
- There are many fascinating photos associated with news stories for students to comment and speculate on, even if the words are rather complicated to understand.
- Listening to newsreaders from different sources provides a good example of clear pronunciation in a range of accents.
This lesson is not designed around the analysis of one to particular news story, but instead it is more about helping advanced students to get an overview of current events and practise describing news events. It is best suited to students studying in an English-speaking country or those with access to online newspapers in English.
Lesson overview
Doing a warmer activity
5 minutes
Play ‘Find That Story’. Hand out a few copies of the same newspaper. Read out a headline. In teams, students race to find which page the headline came from. Choose headlines from different sections to subtly get students more familiar with the layout of the newspaper.
Introducing sections of the newspaper
10 minutes
Brainstorm with students as many different sections of a newspaper as you can and set them out on the board as a list. Your list may include:
international news
business
politics
localised news
entertainment
technology
fashion
lifestyle
sports
celebrity gossip
opinion
classified ads
Make sure students pronounce the names of the sections well and drill any tricky ones.
Give the students two minutes to talk in pairs and ask from their partners:
- How often do you read the news or a newspaper?
- Which paper or news source do you prefer?
- Which sections of the news do you read?
Get feedback from the students, asking one person from each pair to explain their respective reading habits.
Reading the news
10 minutes
Ask students to confirm which sections are present in the newspaper you’ve brought in and used during the warmer activity. Put the class into small groups of three or so students, and give each group a section to work on. You don’t need to cover all the sections; just remove the names of the unallocated sections from the board.
Following the feedback you received from the previous speaking activity (see ‘Introducing sections of the newspaper’), you can now group students together according to the newspaper section they favour. Doing this tends to ensure that they understand more of the vocabulary that they encounter.
Each group selects a story in their newspaper section, notes the headline and reads the text. They must prepare to explain the headline and story to their classmates. They can use a dictionary as necessary, and you should monitor to give assistance with unclear sentences.
Remind students that for longer stories the lead will supply many of the important facts, so they should make sure that they understand that initial part of the story at least. If there are shorter stories, the group can read more than one, as time permits.
Working together on a news overview
15 minutes
After the students have had time to read and discuss their text, ask a representative from each group to note the headline and a very short summary of the story on the board, as I show in Figure 20-3.
When the groups have completed their section, students can highlight on the board a word or phrase they don’t understand.
Figure 20-3: Example board work for a news overview.
Presenting the news
10 minutes
Regroup the students: take one student from each of the previous newspaper section groups and put them all together as a new, larger group. The new group now contains someone who can talk about each section. For example, if the previous groups were organised as AAA, BBB and CCC, they now became ABC, ABC, ABC.
In turn, each person presents their news story, explaining the headline, summarising the story and explaining any new vocabulary that is important to understanding the text. Encourage students to offer opinions about the story and their views of the newspaper’s coverage of it. Classmates are free ask the presenter questions.
Giving student feedback
5 minutes
Having listened carefully to the presentations of each story, correct any significant errors, such as inaccuracies with tenses or poor pronunciation (without identifying the culprits who messed up). If you’re doing this on the board, use one section of it but don’t erase the news overview chart just yet.
In the rare event that there are no significant errors to feedback on, ask students to explain one of the news stories they didn’t read, based on the presentation they heard from a classmate.
Finishing with a board rush activity
Clean the board of everything except the new vocabulary highlighted on the news overview chart. Add all the other new words the students have learnt in the lesson, such as classified ads or splash. Now have a board rush game: give two students at a time board pens, and challenge them to run to the board and cross off the word that matches the definition you shout out. The first player to cross off the right word wins, but the players can only cross off one word each.