Читать книгу Newspapers - Peter Grundy - Страница 5

‘British newspapers are something else,’ as a friend from overseas said to me recently. I suppose he meant that the popular Press in Britain contains little news, preferring instead the ‘human interest’ story. And of course he was also being mildly critical. But it is very doubtful whether this image of the British Press as ‘something else’ is shared by those unfortunate language learners who have been fed on a diet of inscrutable headlines (‘Left in the dark over racism’, etc.), boring materials from ‘quality’ newspapers, and interminable ‘comprehension’ passages. This book champions a quite different approach to the use of newspapers in English Language Teaching, an approach which, broadly speaking, puts the learner’s interests first and the newspaper materials second.

The aims of this book

The overall aim of this book is to provide a range of original, practical ideas for working with newspapers. Original and practical because that is what teachers want, and newspapers because when one has learnt to read a newspaper in a foreign language, one begins to feel that one has gone some way towards learning the second language successfully. The ultimate aim of the book is to give the students the confidence to buy and read English-language newspapers for themselves.

In the classroom, the aim is to get students first reading newspapers and then working with what they have found in their reading. In the activities in this book, ‘reading’ usually involves looking for something specific; and ‘working with what they have found in their reading’ may mean anything from making a collage to crossing out what is distasteful.

A second methodological aim is to get the students to teach themselves, as far as possible, by giving them authentic, involving activities to work on, usually in pairs and small groups.

A third, wider aim is to provide access to an important source of information, which also, in English-speaking countries, reflects significant cultural and political attitudes.

To sum up: Although this is a resource book in the obvious sense that it contains lots of practical, newspaper-based classroom activities, its underlying purpose is not only to provide teaching resources of this kind, but also to give students practice in the skills needed to enable them to read English-language newspapers for themselves.