Lesson Plan #: AELP-ESL0204

Introducing Electronic Newspapers (e-paper) in the ESL Reading Classroom

An Educator's Reference Desk Lesson Plan

Submitted by: Ying-Ying Chuang (Kimberly)
Email: cyying@yahoo.com
School/University/Affiliation: Cheng-Shiu Institute of Technology, Kaohsiung County, Taiwan, ROC

Date: August 1, 2002

Grade Level: Vocational Education, Adult/Continuing Education

Subject(s):

Duration: 50 minutes

Description: In this activity, ESL students use online newspapers to practice their reading skills, specifically skimming and scanning.

Goals: Students will be able to improve their reading skills, enrich their vocabulary, gain some cultural knowledge, and be up-to-date with current situations in the world.

Objectives:

  1. Students will be able to identify the various sections of a newspaper.
  2. Students will be able to skim, scan, and summarize newspaper articles.
Materials: Procedure:
Warm-up: (10 minutes)
 To begin, discuss techniques for "how to read the newspaper," and introduce the elements of the newspaper, such as headlines, pictures, topic sentences, body, etc. Next, talk about the definitions and importance of "skimming" and "scanning." Then use today’s local newspaper to demonstrate these two techniques. Ask the students when and why they need to use these techniques (have students brainstorm). Skimming: Quickly running one's eyes across a whole text to get the gist. It gives readers the advantage of being able to predicate the purpose of the passage, the main topic. Scanning: Quickly searching for some particular pieces of information in a text. Scanning exercises may ask students to look for names, dates, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list a certain number of supporting details. The purpose of scanning is to extract specific information without reading through the whole text.

Communicative Activity: (15 minutes)
Introduce and show the web site, "Online Newspapers—thousands of world newspapers at your fingertips" ( http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/index.htm ). After making sure every student's computer is at the web site, ask students to locate different topic areas -- front page, weather, sports, classified, entertainment, etc. Next, go back to the news section; assign well-known headline international news and ask students to find information about the news by looking through different countries/newspapers. Then ask students to select one article, use skimming and scanning techniques, and summarize the article. Finally, select several students to report their summaries and then compare theirs with other students' summaries.

Focus Practice: (25 minutes)
Activity I : Pass out a selected e-paper article to each pair of students. Students will discover that the first sentence from each paragraph has been deleted. Ask students to put the sentences back into the correct places in the text. When finished, have each pair of students discuss their answers with another pair.

Activity II : Give each pair of students another article -- this time jumble the paragraphs for the students to re-order.

Activity III : Give each pair a third article. Highlight some words in the text and ask students to deduce their meanings from the context.

Assessment: As a follow-up assignment, have students locate an article from e-paper to practice skimming and scanning skills. Then students should summarize the article. They need to print out the original article from e-paper and then turn in the assignment for the next class.

Useful Internet Resource:
* Online Newspapers
http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/index.htm