Using News Articles in English Class

There are a number of activities to get students involved in conversations and one of the best ones I like to do is getting the person to use article titles to create them. Even taking article clippings in order to generate a discussion helps getting students to express themselves. One has to get the student to look at newspaper or magazine articles differently in order for them to understand the basis of the exercise but it is very simple to conduct. If the person is reticent to use this to initiate a conversation, the teacher should show him what information given by the title can be elaborated on in the article and explain the elaboration process using random topics as examples.

When a person sees an article heading he can use notions that he has acquired over the years to elaborate on what he thinks the title is about. Otherwise he could read the article following a heading and try to put that into his own words. The teacher can also get readers to pick up a number of phrasal verbs from the context and ask the person to give the classical word equivalent for them. So actually one can create several exercise from newspaper articles and they all help to create further conversations. There is an addition plus in doing newspaper article exercises and that is it indirectly helps to improve the person reading comprehension.