Advice on using newspapers and news sites

Newspapers and internet sites covering the news are a wonderful resource for language learners.  There is nothing like the latest news to stimulate debate, discussion and argument.  In addition, such texts should be more easily understood if students are aware of the news in their mother tongue.

There are hundreds of ways of using newspapers and news sites in a language class.  Here are just a few ideas for teachers:

1. Jumble up the paragraphs from an article and ask your students to find the correct order. This can be done individually or in groups.
2. Remove some key words from an article and ask your students to find the missing words.
3. Split your students into groups and give each member of the group a different paragraph from an article.  Then ask the students to piece together the information by asking questions from other members of the same group.  All the infomation sharing should be done orally. This is an information-gap activity.
4. Find some interesting advertisements, and ask students to give their opinion about the messages the ads are trying to convey.  This is an opinion-gap activity.
5. Take a provocative article from one of the tabloids and study the idioms and colloquialisms.
6. Give students the job of "reporting" an event in the news.  Compare the student writing to actual articles on the same event.
7. Ask a group of students to prepare a news "broadcast" from a newspaper and deliver it live to the rest of the class.
8. Try reading an article with different regional accents and ask your students what the characteristics of each accent are.
9. Compare the same news item from different angles i.e. from different sources. See how different newspapers in different countries report a news item.
10. Take some photos from the main stories in the headlines and ask students to guess the captions beneath them.

Students learning a language in some situations are not very well motivated e.g. students at school who don't see the relevance of the target language. If teachers can provide students with texts that are intrinsically motivating by their topical content this can help to provide the interest needed. e.g. if students are interested in pop music or football they may find the latest news about their heros worth the effort of decoding.

Please see a good selection of links to online newspapers and news sites from around the world on our news broker page