Don’t...
• Make a song and dance about teaching words like headline, editorial, column, and leader. Is it that useful to learners?
• Assume learners are interested in British, American, Canadian or Australian culture, particularly tabloid gossip. The British tabloids, for example, are a culturally specific type of newspaper and are not universal.
• Dwell on comparative style and discourse features of tabloid papers versus broadsheets. These are often either obvious or of interest only to journalists and media students.
• Assume what you find interesting in a newspaper will interest your learners.
• Spend ages with tipped blanking out words (if you want to do this type of exercise get your learners to white out words themselves and test each other).
• Set simple tasks for lower level learners with a very difficult piece of text, e.g. find three numbers and two countries in this 3 column article on the Middle East. Unless these tasks are followed up with an opportunity to comprehend and interact with the text, they’re condescending and (almost) pointless.
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Ideas on how to use newspapers
The following are a list of ideas on how to use a newspaper authentically in the classroom. Of course, old habits can die hard, so we have included some other, TEFL classroom type activities that we like as well.