Let’s take a look at using the news for teaching English. As I’ve mentioned in other articles, the news is a great tool when learning a language. It’s also a great tool for teaching. The news provides teachers with an endless stream of material. It’s updated daily and covers just about any topic.
Using the news in a lesson is a very effective way to engage students and help them improve their language skills. However, we don’t just want to give our students an article and tell them to read it. It’s definitely helpful, but it’s not the best use of their time with a teacher. They can do that alone at home!
We also want to be aware of the level of our students’ language abilities. A lot of news articles are pretty difficult! The news stories in easy English on this site can be very useful in the classroom.
Let’s look at some ways to use the news for teaching English:
Starting Your News-based Lesson
Here are some different options for starting a news-based lesson with your student or students. You can mix and match the different suggestions to best fit the environment, students’ abilities, and lesson purpose.
- Share the title of the story and ask the student(s) what they think the story is about based on the title. This can be done as a whole class, in pairs/groups, or in a one-on-one lesson.
- Before giving the story to the students, write some of the difficult vocabulary from the news article on the board. Try to elicit the meanings of the words from the students. If they don’t get them all, that’s OK. Leave the ones that they don’t know blank. You can come back to them after reading the article. Can the students figure out the meanings of the words in context?
- After seeing some of the vocabulary but before sharing the story, ask the students if they still think the story is about what they had originally thought.
- Before giving the article to the students, write a list of random words on the board, but make sure to include some vocabulary from the article. After sharing the headline with the student(s), ask them which words they think are in the story and which aren’t.
- Put the students in pairs or small groups and share an image from the news article with them. Ask them to think of possible headlines or explain what the story might be about based on the image.
- Have the groups share their ideas with the class before reading the article.
Reading the News Article
- Ask the students to read the story to themselves quietly
- Have students take turns reading sentences or paragraphs, depending on the length of the story and the number of students
- For one-on-one lessons, you can ask the student to read aloud to practice pronunciation (take note of their mistakes) or the student can read to themselves.
- If it’s a long article, you may want to stop halfway through to answer any questions and check basic comprehension
After Reading the News Article
I would recommend that you start by answering questions about difficult vocabulary and phrases from the news article.
After that, you can:
- Put the students in pairs or groups and ask them to create a summary to share with the class. In a one-on-one lesson, just ask your student for a summary of the article.
- In groups or pairs, ask the students to come up with a couple of comprehension questions.
- After, the pairs can take turns asking and answering each other’s questions.
- Discuss the article as a class, the teacher being the moderator. You can pose questions and call on students to share their opinion or answer. Encourage them to ask questions, too. With discussions, it’s always helpful to play devil’s advocate. This also works in one-on-one English lessons.
- Before the lesson, prepare some true or false questions based on the news story that you can ask the students.
- Depending on the size of the class, the type of news story, and the environment, you could split the students and ask them to debate the topic. Assign roles, Group A is in favor of (…) and Group B is against (…)
Using News Articles in 1-on-1 Lessons
You can easily adapt most of the above methods to one-on-one lessons. It’s also easier to have an open discussion about a news story in a 1-on-1 lesson. If you need discussion ideas, some of the easy news articles have questions at the bottom of the page.
News stories can also be used to practice listening, reported speech, and summarizing. Again, little to no preparation! To practice listening and summarizing with your student:
- Make sure the student cannot read or see the story while the audio plays.
- Ask them to listen closely. You can let them take notes if they’d like.
- Read the story to them out loud and then ask them to summarize it. If there are quotes in the story, you can also ask the student what the people in the article said.
What Are Your Tips for Using News Articles in Your English Lessons?
I hope you find my simple lesson exercises useful. I always try to keep my lessons simple and focused on language instead of using up a lot of time with instruction. You’ll also notice there’s very little preparation with these methods!
If you need simple news stories for your English lessons, please check out my free material, updated regularly. I write real news stories in simple, easy-to-understand English.
For even more lesson ideas and free material, visit ESL Wild and take advantage of their great resources. Charlie’s lessons (also on YouTube) is another one.
I’m sure some of you experienced teachers have different ways of using the news in an English lesson with students. If you’d like to add anything, feel free to share your tips with us on Twitter or Facebook!
