ESL News Lessons

Which article selected proves equally important for a successful lesson. Consider the following points:

How appropriate is the topic?
Is the topic right for the age group and background of the students?

Will the students be interested in the topic?

Could some students find the article offensive, upsetting, or both?

How about the length and the language used?

Is the article roughly 200 to 300 words? This will allow reinforcement activities in a 90-minute lesson, as opposed to much of the class devoted to reading and understanding the piece. Of course, with an easier article, you can raise the word total. A more difficult piece requires fewer words, though.

Will you need to rewrite portions of the article because of the length of the class or the ability of the students?

Does the article contain challenging language? If it's too challenging, the students will likely struggle to understand the piece, and will then translate line by line.

Does the article focus on a useful or important topic, such as crime, medicine, or another current event in the news? How about useful grammar points?

What about the supporting activities?

Can you imagine activities to teach the article? It's important to structure a warm up, pre-reading, vocabulary exercises, and so on. If you can't think of activities around the topic of the article, perhaps a different piece would be better.

Will the article lend itself to a debate, discussion, or role plays? Students will then have the chance to incorporate new information with old information plus language and vocabulary from the article.

A successful lesson with articles requires a few points to consider, otherwise the class could easily turn into nothing more than a long chat. Sixty or ninety minutes of class time devoted to improving fluency isn't a bad thing per se, but you can explore other options to give a more effective lesson. Consider the following:

The article should offer students some new information on a topic, which will then get integrated with pre-existing knowledge. Mixing new information with old information provides a bridge, and aids retention of new vocabulary, expressions, and grammar.

Sometimes the topic isn't familiar, though. In such instances, the article should allow students an easy opportunity to do thirty minutes of independent research as preparation or as homework. Wikipedia or Google News are great places to start, and the research can be in the native language of the student or in English. Again, retention is improved because new and old information gets mixed together. Students can also go back to either source and write a short essay or make a presentation on the topic.

Moving on, the article should give students the chance to improve one or more skills. The lesson could focus on reading, for example. The students would skim for the gist and/or scan for specific information. Both are useful skills used in daily life, such as when reading classified ads, receiving and responding to emails, or attending a meeting. If you wanted to focus on vocabulary, students could easily study the new words, see them in context, and use them later in the lesson.

Lastly, each skill serves as reinforcement for other skills. If students skim for the general information of the article, they can then get into pairs and orally summarize the information. Of course they won't remember all the details, and may even get some parts completely wrong. So everyone returns to the article to skim once more, followed by a second summary in pairs. Reading and speaking support one another, and students improve both to collect and confirm the information.