3 Using news stories in the English classroom

Ms Halima teaches English to Class X. At a recent training session she learnt more about using resources in the classroom, such as the radio, television and newspapers. In this class, she uses a local news story as a prompt for a class discussion in English.

I teach in a rural school with few facilities, so it’s difficult for me to use the radio or TV in the classroom, and it’s not always easy to find an English-language newspaper. When I was at the training session, all I could think of was how difficult it was for me to find resources in English, even though I could see that my students would probably benefit if I used them.

But then something happened in our local area that everyone talked about, and the local newspapers contained many stories about it. A leopard from the nearby forests had come into a neighbouring village. The villagers had been upset and scared, and one of them had killed the leopard.

The students were very interested in this story, and I heard them talking about it before class. I thought it would be useful to capture this interest for English lessons. I decided to make use of a newspaper article about this, even though it was in Assamese. I could ask about it in English, and it could provide a stimulus for other English activities.

I found a short article on the event and brought it to class. I told my students that we were going to discuss a current event in the local community. I asked one of my students to read the story aloud to the whole class. Then I asked my students, in English, ‘Can you tell me what the article is about?’

I waited but the class was silent. Eventually, Rajesh said in Assamese: ‘Madam, it is about how humans and animals have conflicts.’

So I replied, ‘Good, that’s right. Can anyone help Rajesh say this in English?’ I got students to tell me the English words for ‘humans’, ‘animals’ and ‘conflicts’, and eventually someone said, ‘It’s about humans and animals fighting.’

I then wrote some questions in English on the board that I had prepared before class. These questions were meant to provoke a discussion among my students. There are no right or wrong answers to them.

I made sure that students understood the questions by asking for translations.

I put my students into groups of four and told each group to choose a secretary to make notes of their ideas. I told each group to discuss the questions on the board and decide together on one answer. They would then present their opinion to the class. I gave them ten minutes to do the activity.

As students discussed the questions, I walked around and listened to what they were saying. At first they mostly spoke in their home language, but then they changed to English when they planned what they would say to the class. I provided language support to a few groups as they worked, helping with unknown vocabulary words and reminding them to use the past tense.

After ten minutes, I asked the secretaries to present their group’s opinions. I decided to ask each group to give just one of the three answers, as it would take a long time to do each of them, and the students might lose interest.

Students had much more to say in this activity because it was a story that they were interested in, so I’m going to try to find more interesting and topical news stories for them to discuss. I didn’t want this activity to take up our whole class time, but next time I might make it longer. They could have written up their ideas in a paragraph after the discussion, for example. Maybe I’ll do that next time we discuss a news story.