Making the News: A Motivating Writing Skills Project for ESL Students
Clare Wardman
c.wardman1 {at} yorksj.ac.uk
York St John University (York, UK)
Rationale
Many ESL students, children and adults alike, dislike or even dread writing tasks in the ESL classroom, finding them boring or difficult (Winer,1992: Cimcoz, 1999). This can lead teachers to avoid all but the shortest of writing tasks in the classroom, for fear of not being able to motivate or support their students highly enough.
The project described below has been used to good effect with two different groups of students studying on short courses at a university in northern England and can be adapted to suit different levels with relative ease. It can also be condensed or expanded to last between just two or three sessions and almost a whole week of a full-time programme. At the end of their programmes, both groups of students rated this activity as one of their favourites, despite initial reactions to writing tasks being rather less than favourable.
Introduction to the Project
The goal of the project is for small groups (between three and five students) to produce a newspaper, or the front page of a newspaper within the timescales decided. In completing this project the students will develop:
• Writing skills, thinking about and using a variety of registers and styles and producing a large-scale piece of writing
• Research skills, using the internet and other sources to write their articles
• Team-working skills and peer teaching, through the editing process
• Time management skills, to complete the job within given timescales
This project was carried out with a group of higher intermediate students and comprised the bulk of their work completed during the week themed “Media” of the summer programme. Adaptations made for a group of elementary learners later will be described in parentheses throughout.
Technological Requirements
There are, of course, a number of ways in which the students could present the final ‘newspaper’. Without access to computers or printers, it would be possible to produce a hand-written newspaper on A3 paper, for example. However, I found that, by using Microsoft Publisher, the groups could produce very professional-looking documents with minimal design effort, which is also endorsed by West (2002). The fact that there is a wide range of newsletter templates to choose from allows each group to opt for very different and individual styles. This and the resulting professional look certainly increased motivation levels.
At the end of the project, it is likely that you will want to print copies of the final product and therefore, it is important to think about whether the printers you have access to will cope with the fairly large files that will be produced. Additionally, the newspapers will look far better if it is possible to print them in colour, but, of course, this is not completely necessary.
The Process
In this section, I will describe the week in which the newspaper project was completed, which comprised 10 teaching sessions of 90 minutes. You may wish to omit some of these sessions and enhance or expand others.
Day One
Session 1
An introduction to the media: bring in some newspapers. This leads to a lot of discussion around newspapers in the students’ home countries and whether they read them, political leanings and the ‘quality’ versus ‘tabloid’ debate.
Session 2
This lesson is spent looking in more depth at the newspapers, scanning and skimming newspapers to categorise them and learn vocabulary about particular sections of the newspapers. At the end of this session, I set homework for the students to write about something that was making the local news in their home town, which meant that we could have an International News section in our newspapers by the end of the week. This homework was submitted on day two and feedback given for corrections on day three.
Day Two
Session 1
An introduction to writing for a newspaper: upper-intermediate and advanced students may be interested in the fact that newspaper articles and press releases are written in a very different way from more ‘normal’ pieces of writing. All of the important information is contained early on with progressively more detail added later. An interesting reading for detail exercise can be designed, using texts found in current newspapers to allow the students to discover this. In reality, whether they incorporate this in their final work is not so important.
Session 2
A short writing task, set as you wish (using coursebook materials if preferred) culminating in each student writing a film or music review that will form part of the newspaper by the end of the week.
Day Three
Session 1
Introduce the students to a piece of research per group. I did this by visiting a local museum and asking the students to choose an aspect to research and then write about in more depth later (the adaptation for the lower level