Englishonthe.net

Everyone seems to be talking about the death of print media.  It’s a bit grim really.  I just checked and @themediaisdying has announced the departure of ten more news organs in the past 24 hours.  No matter which way you turn it, there is nothing that will replace the satisfaction of sitting down with a good coffee on one of those rare Saturday or Sunday mornings when you don’t have to set the alarm, and have nothing more urgent to do than meander through a newspaper.  Even the smell of a newspaper gets me in a relaxed frame of mind.

I also find that many of the newspaper activities I like to do with language learners just don’t really work in the same way with Internet news – at least not without a lot of adaptation.

I was intrigued to discover a link on Open Culture to Newseum, dubbed as “the world’s most interactive museum”.  As it’s situated in Washington DC there’s not much chance of me visiting it in the forseeable future, but they have a great feature called Today’s Front Pages.  This takes you to a flash player map where you can drag your mouse over hundreds of world cities and see a popup of the front page of the day’s newspaper in that city.

Apart from the cool factor I couldn’t immediately see how to use it for language learners as the text on the popup is not very legible.  Then I discovered the toolbar at the top of each popup page allowing you to download a readable pdf of the front page.  So you have the best of both worlds: the print-version of the front pages of hundreds of international newspapers with the accessibility of Internet news media.

How to use “Todays Front Pages” for language learners

This just one of many ideas for exploiting newspapers that I owe to Peter Grundy (see Newspapers).  It practices extensive reading skills, differentiating between and identifying the attributes of different pieces of writing.

Have learners find the same story on the front page of at least three different papers.  Five or six is better for more advanced learners (if working in groups, three to six per group, and each group should choose a different story).

Ask the groups to find as many ways of classifying the versions as possible, so that each newspaper is “the best” according to a certain criterion (for example, the most complex, the funniest, the most informative, the most annoying, the most sensational etc.)  They should be able to give reasons for their choices.

The activity works best if you are able to print the .pdfs and spread them out on a table.  They won’t exactly smell like a newspaper, but your learners might enjoy the novelty of being away from a computer.

More practical ideas teaching and learning with the news media at 5 news sites for authentic language-learning.

Further reading on the death of newspapers in Clay Shirky’s insightful post, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.