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Introduction

IN THE NEWS: Mastering Reading and Language Skills with the Newspaper” helps students become independent, efficient, and critical readers. Through compelling news and feature stories, essays and editorials, learners explore thought-provoking contemporary issues. Related activities and background notes provide a complete framework for improving reading and language skills.

The articles are grouped into thematic sections: NEWS, OPINION, BUSINESS, EDUCATION, ARTS AND LEISURE, SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT, SPORTS. These articles investigate intriguing questions. From serious to light-hearted, and from culture-specific to universal, these articles are sure to interest students.

The activities accompanying each article include:

Previewing the Article - Provides background information to stimulate interest, activates prior knowledge, and establishes reading objectives.

Getting the Message - Focuses on reading skills and critical thinking.

Expanding Your Vocabulary - Builds vocabulary acquisition strategies.

Working with Idioms - Defines and practices key idiomatic expressions.

Making Sense of Sentences, Analyzing Paragraphs, and Analyzing Style and Tone - Encourage analysis of sentences and paragraphs, the structure of an article, and the author’s implied attitude.

Talking and Writing - Presents topics for written and oral discussion. In addition, each section includes a Focus on the Newspaper unit. These units familiarize students with the characteristics and conventions of journalistic writing and introduce strategies for analyzing the contents and viewpoint of articles encountered in daily newspapers.

This collection of articles enables students to become critical readers of newspapers and other English-language materials. Challenged and informed, they will communicate in English with confidence.

News media: the power to inform

Exercise 1

Read the text that follows and point out the types of the media and the press and the difference between them.

Both diplomats and politicians heavily rely on the information they receive from newspapers and electronic means of communication often forgetting that they themselves serve as a source of information for journalists and reporters.

Types of Media and the Press

News and entertainment are communicated in a number of ways, using different media. The media include print media such as newspapers and magazines, and electronic media such as radio and television. The word media is most often used to refer to the communication of news, and in this context means the same as news media. Media and mass media are often used when discussing the power of modern communications.

Programmes or reports are transmitted or broadcast live in a live broadcast, with events seen or heard as they happen, or recorded for broadcast later. There is, of course, a lot of competition between broadcasting and publishing organisations. Most TV, radio networks and newspapers look forward to increasing the size of their audience, or their ratings. High audience figures attract more commercials to be shown in commercial breaks between programmes or advertising published in newspapers and magazines.

Multimedia is the combining of TV, computers and telecommunications to provide information and entertainment services that will be interactive. Users are able to interact with the programmes and influence what they see.

The press usually refers just to newspapers, but the term can be extended to include magazines. Newspapers are either tabloid, a format usually associated in the English-speaking world with the popular press, or broadsheets, associated with quality journalism. Tabloids are sometimes referred to as the gutter press by people who disapprove of them. Tabloids often have large circulations and even bigger readership. Papers such as these are often referred to as mass circulation papers.

(from Key Words in the Media)

Exercise 2

  1. Interview your partner as to the following:

  1. where he/she usually receives information from.

  2. which source of news he/she considers more reliable and why.

  3. how often and which newspapers he/she reads.

  4. if he/she reads any kind of paper, where and when she/he most likely to read it? At home? During a meal? Any time or place?

  5. how she/he normally reads a paper; if s/he:

  1. reads everything from cover to cover; b) reads only those articles which look interesting; c) always reads the same pages of the paper, e.g. the sports section, while never reading other pages; d) reads some articles all the way through from beginning to end or reads only parts of some articles.

  1. what to his/her mind most often makes people want to read a particular newspaper or an article in it – its length or headline, an interesting photograph, how serious or entertaining the paper looks, its political point of view or its popularity with other people.

  2. which newspapers in the English language she/he knows?

  1. Report your findings to the class.

Exercise 3

Read the article below about the press in Britain. Make up 10 questions to cover its contents.

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