Five Ways to Incorporate Newspapers in the Classroom

Recently, I was thinking about ways to use newspaper articles in the language classroom and it reminded me of suggestions that I came across during the period of my MA studies many years ago. With the growing reliance on digital articles and webpages, it is sometimes nice to go back to basics without any smartphones, automatic translation, or AI summarising tools.

In this post, I share five ways to use newspapers in the English language classroom and how best to make such heavy reading accessible for language learners. It is notoriously challenging for learners to become accustomed to reading newspaper articles in English, let alone their first language. When I speak to my students, few of them get their news from printed articles with more reliance on short form content such as Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. Anyhow, with such ideas, hopefully it offers improved accessibility towards newspaper articles for English students.

You can watch the YouTube video above where I detail all five ways to incorporate newspaper articles in the the classroom and Channel Members will be able to access a free lesson.

1. What’s the Story?

The first lesson idea for incorporating newspaper articles is a prediction task, which is obviously titled ‘What’s the Story?’. Here are the steps involved with delivering this activity.

1. Collect a number of images from news stories and place them around the classroom or randomly on the whiteboard.
2. Get students to wander around the classroom or to the whiteboard, looking at the images and telling each other what they know about the news story.
3. Give students 5 minutes to discuss about each of the images and to write down anything that comes to mind; predictions about the article, information that they might already know, as well as what they may have heard or read about the article.
4. Let students choose from the newspaper image which article that they wish to read more about.
5. Get them to think of potential vocabulary by asking learners what they already know about the story.
6. Students read the newspaper article and then compare their prediction to what they have read. Get students to share something new that they learnt from the reading.

2. Guess the Article

The second lesson idea is ‘Guess the Article’ which again gets students thinking of potential news articles based on keywords within selected articles. Kindly follow these steps to deliver this second activity.

1. Select an interesting and engaging newspaper article for the class, preferably a story which is exciting or unusual.
2. Choose eight key words from the article and write them up on the whiteboard and get students to predict the article in teams of 3 or 4 students.
3. Get students to read aloud their own version.
4. Once all students have read their particular versions, get them to compare with the original newspaper article.

3. Matching Headlines and Images

The third lesson activity is essentially a matching exercise for headlines and images. You may extend this activity by incorporating some of the previous activities to this lesson idea.

1. Some newspaper articles, particularly for those online, there are images included within the article. Print out the image, headline and article for at least three to four articles.
2. Cut up the headlines, images and text. Laminate them and then place different groups of students into separate areas in the classroom with one group only having the headlines, another group with just images and one other group just having the article itself.
3. Students look at either the image or read the headline or article. Those student with headlines or images must predict the article. Those students with the article must read the text and review the vocabulary.
4. Once you have some ideas for prediction from headlines or images, get all students together and ask them to put images, headlines and articles matched.
5. Students compare predictions with the original article. Review vocabulary and help where necessary.

4. Headline Extensions

Lesson activity four is ‘Headline Extensions’, whereby the student has to work together in small groups to extend more from just the headline. This activity works well in getting students predicting more from just the headlines – a skill that is second nature for us when we browse headlines prior to reading the entire article. Here are the recommended delivery notes.

1. Cut up a list of different headlines and give small groups of learners one headline.
2. Students work together and try to extend the story from the headline.
3. Once learners have extended their headline, they then present to the other groups.
4. Stick up the corresponding newspaper articles around the classroom on the walls and get students to move around and match their headline to the article.

5. Student Questions

The final lesson activity, ‘Student Questions’, is getting students to take on the role of setting up comprehension questions, either for other students or reading in detail to create such a comprehensive task. This activity would be best suited for students who are preparing for examinations, such as the IELTS or equivalent. Nonetheless, here are the delivery notes.

1. Give students a newspaper article to read or extend from the previous activity.
2. Tell students that they will be working in small groups to create the reading questions for other groups.
3. Students work together for around ten minutes making at least ten questions based on the article.
4. Once students have made their questions, and written them on a piece of single paper, redistribute the questions and get another group to answer the questions.

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If you are wanting the Newspaper Headlines lesson which accompanies this post, then it is available for all Channel Members on my ELT Experiences YouTube Channel. However, if you wish to order the lesson, it can be ordered and downloaded in PDF format below.