News is an important medium to use in class as not only does it expose students to the affairs of the outside world, but it offers you and the students the chance to engage in free talk. Almost all classroom English revolves around a given structure, template, or a whiteboard dialogue. Unless one is a politician or an actor, people rarely ever plan what they are going to say, we are constantly improvising as we speak. This is why free talk is vital for students between 9-10 years and above. It’s a chance to practice speaking freely in a controlled environment. It’s also a chance for students to incorporate everything they have ever learnt into real-time speaking, a task that is much harder than you think for language learners.
If a language learner wants to say something, it’s easy if you give them time to think how to say it – but when speaking one does not have the whole day to wait for someone to get their thoughts across to you. That´s why it’s important to practice free and improvised talking as much as you can because, as they say: practice makes perfect.
Free talk is also useful for the teacher to analyze where the students excel at, where they are weak at, who is stronger at speaking naturally and who is less confident. In free talk, grammar points come up that you may never officially teach such as conditionals, but if you see it’s something important and the students can’t use it effectively, take note of that and incorporate conditionals in the next class.
In China, the students are very closed-minded and ignorant of the world (a ploy of the Chinese government to control their population). Students have limited to no knowledge of geography. They know certain countries exist, but from there they’re hopeless. I once did an activity where students had to figure out, on a globe, where certain countries where. I promise I’m not lying, they genuinely thought that US borders with Iraq. Later in the class, I began to ask them about distances and how far away they think places are from China. Needless to say, their answers were not correct. I eventually moved on from distances between China and other countries and began expanding upon the universe. I asked them how far they thought Alpha Centauri is (after our Sun, it’s the closest star to us). At first, they thought it is just a few days away!
Using the news in your class allows you to touch and expand upon subjects that may otherwise never be mentioned in the school syllabus or even ever in your students’ lives. It’s also important for students to be aware of which countries speak English, their different accents and the differences in cultures. You’re not just teaching your students English, you’re teaching them the culture and traditions that come with English.
It’s vital however to be aware that religion and politics are best (or always) avoided. Not just because of the government, but also because they’re still children and too young to be interested in or really understand such topics.
I usually spend around 5 – 15 minutes (depending on how well the students are reacting) on the news at the beginning of every class. As a teacher, every day you browse through the net, searching for the perfect news article for that week. Try to vary between international, national and local news.
When first introducing news to your students, a nice little thing I like to do is pretending ‘NEWS’ is an acronym:
N = North
E = East
W = West
S = South
Even though this is not true (at least I don’t think so), it works well for the students to remember the spelling and also to memorize these directions. When teaching, there will be many aspects where one must create their own little rule or way of explaining something so that students can remember. It doesn’t need to be true, just memorable.
For example, I once had a class that could never remember to add an ‘and’ before the last object in a list.
It’s all very well teaching students that when listing things, we use commas between each word or phrase, however, English adds an ‘and’ before the last object on a list. It’s important to explain this to the students, but it’s also important to accept that they will easily forget this as you have not made it stick to their minds. What I did for this, as an example, was, I got the students to start saying a list quietly, and (like a teapot boiling or an orchestral performance of ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’) as they progressed through the list they started to get louder and louder until they reach the last word object in the list and like a clash of symbols, they shouted ‘AND …….’! Now they all remember to add an ‘and’ before the last object in a list.
Now back to the topic of news, here is a step by step guide on how to present news to your class, there are of course infinite ways of doing anything when teaching, this is simply a method that has proven fruitful for me.
- Choose the article – Choose the perfect article, there is no strict guideline as to what a good article may be. Simply put, if you think the students will enjoy reading the article and that there will be plenty to discuss about it, then that should be enough. Remember not to choose anything that deals with religion or politics.
- Re-write – Often the article will have tons of hard vocab that the students won’t know. The article will be overloaded with unnecessary information and will be too long and tedious to read in class. This is why it’s important to re-write the article so that you can control what language is used in the article. Don’t be afraid to include new words for your students, just limit it to about 5 new words and always prepare a way to explain the meanings of the words to your students.
- Present a picture – make sure a picture is included with the article, a picture that either sums up the whole article or is a bit of a cliff-hanger intriguing the students to want to know more. Before exposing your students to the article, first show them the picture. I often use a ‘reveal the boxes’ style PowerPoint presentation. This way a part of the picture is slowly revealed and the students can try to guess what is happening and what today’s news is about.
- Story Chart – now the picture is revealed you can create a story chart to figure out what they think the news is going to be about.
- Read the article – just like your first read in a reading class, get one student to read one sentence and then pick another student to continue reading another sentence.
- Questions & Free Talk – if possible get students to ask each other questions about the article. However, as this could be quite challenging, this is the one time the teacher can be excused for creating and asking the students questions which aim to boost the students’ confidence and naturally leads to free talk.
- Comprehension & Writing (optional) – include a comprehension worksheet. The best thing though would be to give your students the worksheet for homework as you don’t want to eat too much of your class time.
Whilst I have spent two hours sometimes doing the news, you should aim to keep it up to 10 – 15 minutes long. However, if it is going well and the students are interested, learning and are peaking constructively: then why stop them?
