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ISSUES Vol.

18, February 2007

13

Electronic Newspapers
(e-papers) in the ESL Reading Class
by Maria Politou
State Secondary school teacher
Vice-President EKADEVE
Gaining access to English speaking newspapers
on the Internet presents language teachers with a
number of teaching possibilities. One can hardly
deny the usefulness of reading English newspapers
in the process of learning. If suited to the students
level of English, newspaper articles can be
interesting to read and may trigger some in-class
discussion, as well as increase students cultural
awareness.
An approach to reading skills is to use electronic
newspapers, since your students will have the
chance to be informed with present life abroad as
well as with current events.
The following lesson plan can be used in the ESL
Reading Classroom or it can be modified through
several ways in which technology provide many
opportunities for students to practice literacy skills.
Grade Level: Upper intermediate
Duration: 50 minutes
Description: In this activity, ESL students use online
newspapers to practice their reading skills, specifically skimming and scanning.

teacher-prepared copies of selected articles from


e-paper
Procedure:
Warm-up: (10 minutes)
To begin, discuss techniques for "how to read the
newspaper," and introduce the elements of the
newspaper, such as headlines, pictures, topic
sentences, body, etc. Next, talk about the definitions
and importance of "skimming" and "scanning." It is
necessary to use a newspaper to demonstrate these
two techniques. Ask the students when and why they
need to use these techniques (have students
brainstorm). Skimming: Quickly running ones eyes
across a whole text to get the gist. It gives readers the
advantage of being able to predicate the purpose of
the passage, the main topic. Scanning: Quickly
searching for some particular pieces of information in
a text. Scanning exercises may ask students to look
for names, dates, to find a definition of a key concept,
or to list a certain number of supporting details. The
purpose of scanning is to extract specific information
without reading through the whole text.
Communicative Activity: (20 minutes)
Introduce and show web sites:

Goals: Students will be able to improve their reading


skills, enrich their vocabulary, gain some cultural
knowledge, and be up-to-date with current situations
in the world.

TIMES ON LINE http://www.timesonline.co.uk/global/


Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Objectives:
1. Students will be able to identify the various
sections of a newspaper.

Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/

2. Students will be able to skim, scan, and


summarize newspaper articles.

THE SCOTSMAN http://thescotsman.scotsman.com

CNN http://edition.cnn.com/ , http://www.cnn.com/

NEWS OF THE WORLD http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/


Materials:
todays newspapers
multimedia language lab (computers with Internet
access)

Daily Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/


The NEW YORK Times http://www.nytimes.com/

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Vol. 18, February 2007

ISSUES

Global and Mail (Canada) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

for the next class.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL http://online.wsj.com/public/us

References
Brown, Ian. (1999) "Internet Treasure Hunts - a
Treasure of an Activity for Students Learning
English." The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. V, No. 3,
March 1999,
http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Brown-TreasureHunts.html

THE Washington Times http://www.washtimes.com


After making sure every students computer is at
the web site you asked for, have students to locate
different topic areas front page, weather, sports,
classified, entertainment, etc. Next, go back to the
news section; assign well-known headline
international news and ask students to find
information about the news by looking through
different countries/newspapers. Then ask students to
select one article, use skimming and scanning
techniques, and summarize the article. Finally, select
several students to report their summaries and then
compare theirs with other students summaries..
Focus Practice: (20 minutes)
Activity I : Pass out a selected e-paper article to
each pair of students. Students will discover that the
first sentence from each paragraph has been
deleted. Ask students to put the sentences back into
the correct places in the text. When finished, have
each pair of students discuss their answers with
another pair.
Activity II : Give each pair of students another
article this time jumble the paragraphs for the
students to re-order.
Activity III : Give each pair a third article. Highlight
some words in the text and ask students to deduce
their meanings from the context.
Assessment: As a follow-up assignment, have students locate an article from e-paper to practice skimming and scanning skills. Then students should summarize the article. They need to print out the original
article from e-paper and then turn in the assignment

Kitao, Kenji. (1996) "Teaching the English


Newspaper Effectively" The Internet TESL Journal,
Vol. II, No. 3, March 1996,
http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Kitao-Newspaper.html
Muehleisen, Victoria. (1997) "Projects Using the
Internet In College English Classes." The Internet
TESL Journal, Vol. III, No. 6, June 1997,
http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Muehleisen-Projects.html
Pfaff-Harris, Kristina. (1996) "Copyright Issues on
the Web." The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. II, No. 10,
October 1996,
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Harris-Copyright.html
Seedhouse, Paul. (1994) "Using Newspapers on
CD-ROM." TESL-EJ, Vol. 1, No. 2, August 1994,
http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej02/a.3.html
Schmidt, Ken (1999) "Online Extensive Reading
Opportunities for Lower-Level Learners of EFL/ESL."
TESL-EJ, Vol. 4, No. 1, July 1999,
http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej13/int.html
Tuzi, Frank. (1997) "Using Microsoft Word to
Generate Computerized Tests." The Internet TESL-EJ,
Vol. III, No. 11, November 1997,
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Tuzi-Tests/

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