Using Newspapers in Class

My materials that were prepared a few days earlier.

Yesterday, I had my second observed teaching class and I decided for the lesson that I was going to use newspapers.  I had developed some great rapport with the students.  I have never used newspapers in class and I feel that I should develop my teaching skills to incorporate some authentic material for the classroom.  Having never used newspapers in class before, it was a personal aim to include the use of newspapers as a basis for a lesson.  I read various books to get some great ideas including “Newspapers” (Grundy, 1993), “Using Newspapers in the Classroom” (Sanderson, 1999), “Teaching Unplugged” (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009) as well as “Practical English Usage” (Swan, 2005).  All these books had some great ideas for implementing newspapers in the classroom with the later focusing on the more conventional vocabulary and grammar.  I do have to personally thank Sue Annan for emailing me and providing me with some great resources which I will definately put to good use once I have completed my Advanced Practical Teaching course.  Nonethless, the linguistic aim for the lesson was to ensure that by the end of the lesson learners will be able to read and summarise various newspaper articles.  The sub aims focused on more of the practical skills such as reading for gist, skimming, etc as well as the forms and conventions of newspaper articles.  The main task (which I will go into more detail below) focused on a using visual clues to activate schema and encourage prediction.  So, what did students do for the lesson?

I started the lesson by asking students what they have heard on the news recently.  I felt this would be a simple and effective starter for the lesson.  This discussion (which included Egypt) naturally moved towards newspapers and at this point I asked students what British Newspapers they have read.  Students brainstormed for a few minutes and I transcribed their ideas/answers on to the whiteboard.  I then referred to a list of British Newspapers that I had found and showed some titles on PowerPoint.

The next part of the lesson was to introduce some Headlines and encourage learners to create sentences from the headlines.  I demonstrated this with the “Furniture Factory Pay Cut Row” and the sentence was provided included “A ROW (disagreement) about a CUT (reduction) in PAY at a FACTORY that makes FURNITURE.”  I gave the students 3 headlines to work through and assisted with any vocabulary queries they had which included “Red Tape”, “Slug” and “PM”.  I inserted one ambiguous headline (Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge) to see if they could spot the ambiguity but it was not possible.  It wasn’t the aim of the lesson so I let this possibility fade away as the lesson progressed.

This provided some progress on to the next part of the lesson, which introduced the idea of how small changes to the verb within a headline could change the meaning.  The example that I selected from Swan’s book was the classic “Boy Found Safe” vs “Boy Finds Safe”.  I provided learners a short time to figure out the differences in meaning.  Learners were able to determine that the lexical item “safe” has two meanings; one as a noun and the other as an adjective.  From this they were able to provide some example of the difference.

With the conventions and forms of headlines were introduced, it was time for students to put what they had learnt into practice.  I decided that a jigsaw activity was useful.  I bought several newspapers one day and then sat down and just cut out all the news articles that I found interesting (hoping that students would find them also interesting).  Each article must have a picture, a headline (almost all do) and an introductory paragraph for the news article (most do).  Once I had selected five stories, the pictures and headlines were glued on my old cereal boxes with cellotape used to laminate and protect them.  The introductory paragraphs were transcribed on to my PC, printed out and cut up.  I put students into three groups; one group had pictures, the other headlines and the other group had introductory paragraphs.  Each group had to keep their material secret and describe the headline (in a full sentence), describe what was in the picture and the other group explaining the main story (summarising the information).  The learners had to match the pictures/headlines/introduction all together.  The students were really active and I just let them get on.  They were really keen to talk about the material they had with each other and discuss amongst themselves.  They worked really well and were autonomous to a greater degree.  Once the material were all grouped together correctly, I got students to select stories that they found interesting.  Again this generated more discussion and the students were really taking charge of the lesson.

My teaching portfolio is increasing each time I add to it.

With a little bit of time left (about 10 minutes), and not really wondering if I should continue with the last activity (but did nonetheless), I introduced a humorous news article about “Crime-fighting milkman to collect MBE”.  I provided some keywords (drug deals, MBE, cow, queen, etc) and asked students to write their own expectation of the story using the keywords within their text.  They worked in groups and this really helped with creative writing.  Groups then wrote their story on the board and this gave rise to some cold error correction.  At the end, I showed the photo of the milkman collecting his MBE in a cow suit and provided the full article to the students to read at their pleasure.

Like I mentioned earlier, this was the first time that I had used newspapers in class.  I felt that I had used the newspapers well but there is so much more that teachers can do to include newspapers in class.  My DoS has mentioned that the use of “The i” by the Independent is written in such an easy to read way which could help students read extensively.  Furthermore, it is only 20p in the UK and available free on the iPad.  Anyhow, I hope to use newspapers more in class and will be referring more to the books mentioned earlier.

I have provided some resources that I used in class below for those that are interested.  Anyhow, I leave you with some questions for your own ideas.  What has been your experience of using newspapers?  What areas do you focus if you use newspapers in class?  Do you think newspapers is suitable for all levels?

Newspapers Presentation
Newspapers Presentation

Newspaper Paragraphs Ready to Cut
Newspaper Paragraphs


Crime-fighting Milkman
The Daily Telegraph – Milkman Awarded MBE