| What the papers say |
|
|
This bilingual cross-curricular activity is to give your students practice in English at doing what they have already done in another school subject in their mother tongue (L1). In this case, in their social sciences textbook the students have studied ‘How to read a newspaper’. As a first step the different sections of a newspaper (International, National, Economy, etc) are listed and described. All this in L1, of course. Now we take a list of sections from English language newspapers – one British, one American – and let them find the equivalents. For example, they find what is listed as ‘National’ in theirtextbook may appear as ‘UK News’ or ‘USA’. What appears as ‘Opinion’ in their country’s newspapers is listed as ‘Comments and Leaders’ in a British paper. ‘Economy’ appears as ‘Business’ in both British and American papers. The English language section ‘Travel’ would have to be listed under ‘Culture’ or ‘Society’, etc. The main part of the L1 social sciences lesson is ‘How to analyse a news item’. Students are asked to follow a series of steps. Find an article from an English language newspaper of an appropriate length, level and content. You will probably want to adapt it minimally. Let your students follow the same steps as for the L1 article. The steps are: ● Read the article. (Pre-teach some vocabulary; provide a glossary.) ● Say what newspaper the article is from. In what section does it appear? ● What are the headings and sub-headings of the article? ● What words and proper nouns are unfamiliar to you? (Discuss with a partner/partners.) ● What is the main idea of the article? And the secondary idea? ● Does the author of the article express his or her opinion or just report the facts? ● What relevance does this article have for someone studying social sciences in your country? ● Explain the article to a partner and discuss it with him or her. ● Give a written summary of the article. You can include your own point of view and comment on the way the author treats the subject matter. Choose any language work that suggests itself from the text (reported speech, word families, collocation, etc). As a follow-up activity, students could find one L1 and one L2 article about a common topic and analyse and discuss its treatment in pairs or small groups. Simon Andrewes Granada, Spain |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
