Vocabulary

Headlines, news, reports, feature articles, interviews, announcements notices, obituaries and poems in the poetry corner can be used to practise these skills. Expanding new vocabulary is essential for the effective communication and newspapers help us immensely here. News items on various topics including sports, entertainment, culture, health, education, etc can be used effectively to develop vocabulary of learners. The crossword puzzles help children reinforce and enrich vocabulary.

In vocabulary lessons teacher can read a headlines of a news item and elicit learners’ already existing background knowledge and related vocabulary. Apart from enlarging their vocabulary, various activities can be designed to practise the skill of guessing the meaning of unknown words from the context. Learners can be encouraged to look up key words in their dictionaries in order to find an appropriate definition, synonym, or antonym. The sentences in which the key words re-included can be written on the blackboard to highlight the ‘word profile’ (definition, part of speech, connotations, derivatives) of the key vocabulary.

Comprehension questions, finding the main ideas, matching headlines with the news passages, and summarising, are very few activities which can be used to develop the reading sub skills. “Beheading” is an interesting activity can be done even with an old newspaper.

News reports/stories

Teacher selects news reports/stories which interest the children greatly and cut off the headlines and news reports into paragraphs to be distributed randomly to the learners. Each learner reads out his headline or the paragraph to the class. Members carrying the different parts of the same news item and its headline form the group and make the original news report.

Writing is a necessity in life. Newspapers provide an excellent opportunity for teachers to develop learners’ interest in writing. Imitation is an important factor in learning to write. Newspapers are replete with various writing text types which can be analysed to make students expose to different styles of writing and choice of words. Learners can be encouraged to overcome their deeply rooted fear of using the target language by helping them to do parallel writing with these text types and they indeed serve as models to imitate.

The content of a news report can be exploited to teach students how to report about some one or some thing. Headlines or pictures can be used to make up a story to fit them. Each group can be given the first sentence of a news item chosen by the teacher to write the supporting sentences and concluding sentences. They can be motivated by giving them to challenge to write the most vocabulary of the original news item to win the competition.

If the newspaper article has charts, graphs, or figures that are easy to decipher without reading the article, the students can be asked to examine those visuals in order to discover the main idea(s) of the article. Helping learners to connect language to express their personal needs is a great way for teachers to begin addressing the motivation issue in their classroom. Getting them to respond to pen pals corner, encourage them to send their entries to the various competitions published in the newspaper and writing short stories and articles to the children’s page in the newspaper are few activities which can be easily practice in the classroom. Advertisements of newspaper provide much fun and arouse a great deal of interest among learners of English.

Advertisements

The slogans in the advertisements an help the teacher illustrate the grammatical elements, rules, idioms, witty language and many other expressions. Coloured advertisements cut from the newspapers can be glued onto a cardboard and displayed in the classroom for the regular use with the learners at various levels of language competence. The creative teacher profits greatly from designing interesting activities using the slogans in the advertisements.

Simple sentences and short paragraphs can be developed on slogans. The whole class can be converted into business group and encourage them to produce most convincing and tempting slogans for the products and organise an exhibition of advertisements.

The pictures of faces in the newspaper can be employed to encourage learners to decide about the person’s age, nationality, marital status, occupation and other important information and get them to work out a short biography.

The skill of writing letters has become vitally important in the modern society. Letters to the editor help learners study different styles of writing and various functions.

‘The employment opportunity’ can be used to give learners a practical guide in writing letters of applications for the advertised posts.

Newspapers can be effectively employed to practise speaking activities. The students can give speeches about the news items or articles they have read. The speaking skills can be developed through a class discussion on an interesting issue in the newspaper. Most fluency activities can be practice in groups.