Working with a Newspaper/Magazine Story

What kind of news story should I use?

· One with accompanying picture

· One that is not too long

· One about a human interest topic or light-weight in tone (the hard news can be depressing!)

Activities:

Picture: Discuss the photo without the story. Predict what the story is about.

Key words: Choose 10 key words from the story and match to English meanings. Encourage the students to do comprehensive exercises without knowing every word. Encourage guess work.

Idioms: Highlight any idioms or colloquial phrases and discuss (often these are in the headline)

Comprehension: Use general questions such as “What is this all about?” “Where did this take place?” “Who is this about?”

Make statements for the student to mark True or False.

Make statements with one error in them and ask students to correct.

Story Structure: Cut up paragraphs and get students to put in order (may need to leave some out)

Give students the main idea of each paragraph not in order and get them to match with the paragraphs.

Get students to nominate the main idea or sentence of each paragraph.

Grammar: Get students to rewrite sections of the story changing tense (eg past to present, present to future)

Get students to rewrite sections/sentences of the story putting from active to passive and vice versa (eg. ‘A bank was robbed yesterday.’ Changed to somebody robbed a bank yesterday.’)

Get students to rewrite sentences from the story using a conjunction (eg.’Jack the terrier dog was overjoyed yesterday. Jack met his owner again. Jack had been missing for two weeks.’ Use because/when to join.