The republic of uzbekistan uzbek state world languages university english faculty III

Newspapers For Teaching Beginner Or Elementary Esl Learners At elementary level, the teacher can cut out pictures from a newspaper and write sentences about them. These sentences are read to learners who also learn to read them and grasp what they mean. The sentences are also written in their exercise books. Secondly, learners can on their own use simple pictures found in the newspaper, write sentences about them noting the relationships between them and read to the class while the teacher monitors the activity. To develop the writing skill, it is suggested that the teacher can read out a few stories or advertisements from a newspaper and ask the students to write them down.
Moreover, to encourage the development of reading and vocabulary skills of learners using newspaper at elementary or beginner stage, it is also suggested each learner can be assigned an alphabet and be told to read through the newspaper in order to locate ten unfamiliar words beginning with the assigned letter. The learners should also look up for the meaning of those words in the dictionary, indicating the pages of the dictionary where such words were found. They may also look for other things from the newspaper such as compound words, plurals, words in present or past tenses, possessives, words with a particular prefix or suffix, etc. ¹⁸
Newspaper Activities For Intermediate Esl Learners At this level, students can be asked to read short articles from the newspaper and work in small groups. Each student reads a paragraph and highlights the important details to his or her group. The other member of the group each does the same. They, then paraphrase these details into sentences that best capture the event in the article.
Also, it is proposed that students can be asked to circle words they do not understand after reading a newspaper and ask them to find their meanings from the context or look up the meaning from the dictionary. They should also make sentences with these words and write them in their books. In some newspapers, there is a news summary section consisting of many short letters (e.g. on-line reactions section in Daily Trust), students should be given one of these news items and asked to write a headline for it on a separate sheet of paper. Students could also be asked to collect all the stories and the headlines, put them on the table and match stories and headlines. The photograph captions can also be cut and learners told to match captions with the photographs.
Another method that this article suggests of using newspaper for intermediate ESL learners in developing speaking, reading and writing skills is to ask them to analyze the advertisements in a newspaper. Each learner should write his/her findings on an item advertised. These findings should be read in class and shared among the students.
Learners could also collect newspaper photographs of people and make up stories about them. These stories are read in the class by each student writer and discussed with class members. Newspapers can be distributed to students on group basis. A group consisting of five to ten learners (in view of large class size in Nigeria language classes) can be formed each with a newspaper. Each group should be given time limit within which to skim through the paper. When the time is up, join the two groups together and let them report to each other whatever they can remember from the news. Reference should not be made to the news again. The teacher should monitor the groups and provide feedback when necessary. The report given by each group can be harmonized by the joint groups and recorded in their exercise books.
Another approach to using newspaper at intermediate level is by giving each learner a newspaper to work with at home. With the newspaper, students should choose an article and prepare a report on it to their classmates. The report should not be longer than number of words and should include peer teaching on new vocabulary that the leaner encounters in the article. This encourages reading outside the classroom as well as the use of dictionary. A schedule should be set up and a learner or learners should devote the last five minutes of every class to news reports. This project can be made part of class routine.¹⁹