Newspapers in Foreign Language Teaching
The attitude to newspapers can be different. You may like reading them and may not. Some people cannot imagine their morning without fresh newspapers. They simply got into habit of reading them at breakfast. The question arises: can foreign language teachers use newspapers at their lessons.
Using newspapers. A new or an old strategy? Using newspapers in foreign language teaching is rather new trend in the methodology. In many countries newspapers were mostly used at the lessons of foreign languages for current events discussion. In the early 1990-s foreign language teachers from different countries raised the problem of using newspapers at the lessons of foreign language. A lot of techniques have been worked out so far.
Why should we use newspapers in foreign language teaching. There are a lot of reasons for using newspapers in foreign language teaching. It stands to reason that economic newspaper texts provide readers with the latest information about what`s happening in the world`s economy and give the opportunities for classroom discussions. Besides, while reading newspapers students can enlarge their professional vocabulary and learn speech patterns typical for different areas of professional communication. Reading and understanding a newspaper article can cause some difficulties arising from a specific area of its topic. Such difficulties are connected with the author`s writing style, lexical and grammar peculiarities. The students can analyze difficult structures and discuss complex ideas, they read about in the newspaper article. So, newspapers can be used to teach many aspects of language and communication skills. Editorials and gossip columns, serious and lighthearted newspapers can be used to teach formal and informal varieties of English. Letters to the editor can demonstrate good features of letter writing. Newspapers are easy to operate, readily available, affordable and helpful at different levels of learning English.