3. Reading newspaper in the foreign language classroom

There are many reasons why getting students to read newspapers. Reading newspapers helps to make the students' vocabulary stock much richer, to learn and memorize new grammatical structures , to develop the students' speaking skills and to broaden their general outlook.[N. Hanytska, p.28]

When should the teachers involve newspaper's reading? Some methodologists believe that it would be appropriate to include newspaper's reading into the syllabus of the seventh form students of the specialized schools . During the first term a teacher has to prepare the students for such work. Still , it would not be that easy , because the students do not usually have the required linguistic base , though they may know all the grammatical constructions and the tense system , because newspaper style is rather specific and its own peculiarities .

The students must have good dictionaries to work with them . In order to improve the students' "word stock" , a teacher has to stimulate each of them to work individually with dictionaries and new words which they find out in an article. The psychologists are convinced that 13-14 year old students have a new fundamental function of thinking developed which is the ability of prediction (prognosis).

The teachers have to develop in their students, so called, logical way of thinking while reading any text. There are a lot of words which have a similar root (derivatives of one word) and the students may think a bit longer and find out the meaning of a certain word without consulting a dictionary.

When the students are more or less prepared ( regularly they have to prepare reports of the latest events in world ) a teacher has another problem: what material to choose in order to make her students interested and motivate them for further reading.

Any newspaper's material must be appropriately selected and come up to the students' expectations in order not to dismotivate the students in their further work. The material must be fascinating, must awake the students' imagination and stir up their senses. The more amazing the material is, the more actual problems it covers, the more interested the students are.

It is not an easy task for a teacher to select the material. She has to take into consideration the level of language knowledge of her students; the articles should not always entertain the students, from time to time they must read some articles about the latest political, economical, cultural events, but the linguistic units must be selected up to the students' level.

The teacher's task is of great importance. This is a teacher who is responsible for the whole process of reading and whether it will be successful or not. If she prepared a good, so called, pre-reading stage, made her students interested - she is on the half way to a great success.

The goals of the pre-reading stage are to activate the students' knowledge of the subject, to provide any language preparation that might be needed for coping with the passage, and, finally, to motivate the learners to want to read the text.

The first goal of the pre-reading stage is founded upon the notion that the students' previous knowledge and experience affect their comprehension of the material. What teachers do in the way of summoning up the proper frame of reference before the students confront the text, therefore, will influence their success.

Various techniques have been suggested to mobilize existing knowledge, including the use of pictures, movies, field trips, values clarification exercises, and even role-plays.

Discussions have also been found to activate what students know and, through the exchange of information, to enhance their knowledge of the subject. Discussions can be initiated by simply posing questions about the content of the text or by more elaborate means, such as "anticipation guides". The latter is a series of statements, often provocative in nature, which are intended to challenge students' knowledge and beliefs about the content of the passage. After the students have individually indicated their agreement or disagreement on the worksheet provided, they may be put in groups to justify and elaborate upon their responses.

One more reading technique is text previewing. It is often, but not exclusively, used with longer stretches of discourse, such as a chapter from a textbook. The purpose of this activity is to quickly determine the structure of the piece and to identify the key ideas. Normally, this involves examining the title and subtitles, the summary and conclusion, and the visual support material, such as pictures, charts, maps, and the like. Along the way, questions are formulated which will provide the students with a reason for reading. [M.Celce-Murcia, p.203]

Here are some more ideas for a pre-reading stage: - A teacher gives students the title of the article and asks students to predict what the article is about. She may jumble the title, the first three or four words from the beginning of the article and the last three or four words from the end of the article. A teacher asks students to jumble them and predict the contents of the article. Then the students are given the original wording and are asked to express their predictions.

• A teacher gives students three or four key words from the article and asks them to create a possible article, (see Chapter 3, p.37)

• A teacher gives the students the first and the last paragraphs of the article and asks them to create the middle of the article,

(see Chapter 3, p.45)

• A teacher writes questions and answers about selected facts from the article. Then jumbles these up and gets students to match them. She may ask students to write other questions they would like to know the answers to.

• A teacher gives students the names of characters in the article and asks them to speculate about who they might be. She may give them a few details about the character and ask them to think of a suitable name for the character.

• A teacher gives students a passage from the article which is more or less free of comment by the author and asks the students to speculate about the age/appearance/personality of the character/s or possibly the relationship between them if there is more than one.

While-reading stage is also of great significance: guessing the meaning of new words by involving different games, associations, etc. makes the process much more funny and interesting. The aims of the while-reading stage are to help students to understand the specific content and to perceive the rhetorical structure of the text.

This stage, too, requires the teacher's guidance to ensure that students assume an active, questioning approach to the material. Such guidance can be supplied by a number of while-reading tasks. The simplest technique for this purpose is to provide the students before they read with a list of questions that direct their attention to the major ideas of the text. For maximum benefit, the questions should address three levels of understanding: the explicit, the implicit, and the applied. The first solicits literally stated information, the second asks for information that can be inferred, and the third necessitates relating new ideas to previous knowledge or experiences.

Also useful in guiding the students through the text, but considerably more work for the teacher, are "guide-or-ramas" and "pattern study guides", both of which were originally developed for secondary school content reading classes. A guide-or-rama is a series of statements, instructions and questions that leads students through the assigned reading and indicates what information is important, how a paragraph or section is organized, and what is to be learned. Pattern study guides, which are somewhat more limited in scope, focus the students' attention on the ways that paragraphs, or even larger units of text, are typically structured to represent relationships between the main idea and subordinate detail, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, problem and solution, and so on. The most familiar form of pattern study guides is the traditional outline, but other graphic devices such as diagram and flow charts have recently become fashionable. By having the students complete an outline or fill in a graphic, teachers can help students to perceive the relative importance of text concepts and how these ideas are related to one another.

It should be noted that not all of these techniques are suitable for each and every text; the selection of any of them should depend on the nature of the material to be read. All, however, afford the same benefits in that they promote active engagement with the text instead of passive and purposeless reading and, at the same time, develop skills rather than merely test them. [M.Celce-Murcia, p.204]

The very last stage of reading is called post-reading stage. This stage is intended to review the content; work on bottom-up concerns such as grammar, vocabulary, and discourse features; and consolidates what has been read by relating the new information to the learners' knowledge, interests, and opinions.

Many of the devices introduced during the while-reading stage can be used for the purpose of review. At this point, it would be appropriate to put the students in pairs or small groups to compare and verify their responses to the questions or graphics and then check the results with the entire class.

Once the main ideas of the article have been reviewed, work on discrete elements of the passage can be taken. Exercise could focus on grammar points, vocabulary in context or word roots, or discourse markers. It should be obvious that not all of these exercises need to be pursued with each reading, for there is a real danger of murdering the article by dissection. Judicious choices should therefore be made depending on the character of the article and the needs of the students.

The final segment of the post-reading stage should be devoted to integrating the new information from the article with what the students already know. In the context of academic ESL/EFL course, the usual means of doing this is through a writing assignment, but other techniques are available, including discussions, debates, role-plays, and project work. The choice in this case depends on the goals of the program, the inclinations of the class, and, to some degree, the need for variety.

The three-phase approach outlined above need not be carried out slavishly for every reading. Under certain circumstances, it might be appropriate to cut or curtail one or more of the stages. For example, if the students have been reading a series of texts on the same topic, it might not be necessary to spend much time on the pre-reading stage insofar as they will have already activated their previous knowledge and become familiar with the vocabulary and concepts associated with the subject. The key principle to observe is one of flexibility; teachers should avoid using the same exercise types or mechanically following the same lesson plan each time, for to do so will only diminish students' interest and consequently their desire to learn. [M.Celce-Murcia, p.208]

Teaching reading is closely interrelated with testing reading, so we can not work in either field without being concerned with the other.

It is necessary to give tests, because a teacher has to check whether her students understood and memorized everything they were supposed to. On the other hand, tests reveal students' week points and help to revise the previous material.

In most tests, especially tests of general proficiency, it is useful to include a variety of text types for reading comprehension in addition to the usual, more literary prose extracts: e.g. newspaper articles, instructions for using machinery and appliances, directory extracts, public notices, timetables and maps, advertisements, etc. The inclusion of such text types will not only provide a realistic and reliable means of assessment but will also help to motivate students by demonstrating how target language is used in real-life situations. Consequently, it becomes important that the actual presentation of the material should be as authentic as possible. In short, a newspaper article should appear in the actual form of a newspaper article, thereby giving a genuine feel to the material. [J.Heaton, 1991, P-106]

There are numerous ways of testing comprehension of newspaper articles, ranging from multiple-choice items to open-ended questions (i.e. questions which require students to write an answer in a sentence of their own). Although multiple-choice items are sometimes the most suitable instruments for testing reading newspaper, they should not be overused.

Frequently, other item types are far more interesting and useful. The text itself should always determine the types of questions which are constructed. Certain texts may lend themselves to multiple-choice items, others to true/false items, others to ordinary completion items, others to the completion of information in tables, and yet others to open-ended questions. Indeed, sometimes the same text will demand at least two or three different types of items. I am going to mention some of them.

Matching tests. These tests are concerned purely with word or sentence recognition. They test students' ability to discriminate between words and sentences which are spelled in fairly similar ways. Word and sentence matching should be covered by the students as quickly as possible. Once the students have gained familiarity and confidence with this type of test, their performance should be timed to that they are forced to read under some pressure. E.g. Sentence matching test: the testees are required to recognize as quickly as possible sentences that consist of the same words in the same order. They read a sentence followed by four similar sentences, only one of which is exactly the same as the previous one.

People did not demonstrate across Ukraine.

People demonstrated across Ukraine.

Did people demonstrate across Ukraine?

People have demonstrated across Ukraine.

People did not demonstrate across Ukraine.

Multiple-choice tests. The multiple-choice test offers a useful way of testing reading comprehension. It is usually set out in such a way that the candidate is required to select the answer from the number of given opinions, only one of which is correct. The marking process is totally objective because the marker is not permitted to exercise judgments when marking the candidate's answer; agreement has already been reached as to the correct answer for each of item.

However, not all the multiple-choice reading tests are necessarily good tests of reading comprehension. The extent to which the test is successful in measuring what is set out to measure depends largely on the effectiveness of each of the items used.

The sampling of the reading passage is also of great importance and must be related to the broader aims of the language-testing situation.

Many of the texts in both school and public examinations concentrate too much on a literary kind of English. If certain students are learning English in order to read technical journals, for example, then the sampling of the reading abstract should reflect this aim. Ideally in the test of proficiency the text should contain the type of reading task which will be demanded of the testees in later real-life situations. If the test is a class progress or achievement test, the reading passage should be similar to the type of reading material with which the students have been confronted in their work at school, (see Chapter 3, p.49)

True/false tests. The true/false reading text is one of the most widely used tests of reading comprehension. The scoring of such a test is straightforward and quick and the scores obtained by the students can be very reliable indices of reading comprehension provided that the items are well constructed and there are enough of them. True/false tests are of considerable use for inclusion in class progress tests chiefly because, unlike multiple-choice test items, they can be constructed easily and quickly, allowing the teacher more time for other tasks.

The true/false tests have two main advantages: firstly they can encourage guessing, since testees have fifty per cent chance of giving a correct answer for each item, secondly, as the base score is fifty per cent and thus the average test difficulty generally in the region of seventy-five per cent, the test may fail to discriminate widely enough among the testees unless there are a lot of items, (see Chapter 3, p.39)

Tests with blanks. When deciding which word to omit, it is important to choose content words related to the theme or topic as well as grammatical words (connectives such as although, because, etc.).

E.g. KIEV, Ukraine - A beheaded body found in a forest near Kiev was most likely that of a missing _______________ critical of the Ukraine government, the country's chief______________ has said.

Mykhailo Potebenko said DNA tests from Heorhiy Gongadze matched 99.6 percent that of his mother's.

But some __________ such as the body's decay rate raised more issues that remained to be solved, and he could not "categorically" state it was the_______________________journalist, Potebenko added.

Cloze tests. The term "cloze" was first introduced by W.L.Taylor (1953) who took it from the Gestalt concept of "closure" which refers to the tendency of individuals to complete the pattern once they have grasped its overall significance. W.Taylor described it as follows: "A cloze unit may be defined as: any single occurrence of a successful attempt to reproduce accurately a part deleted from the "message", by deciding from the context what the missing part should be." [C.Weir, p.46]

W.L.Taylor first applied this procedure as a measure of testing reading comprehension and later it was used for testing overall language proficiency.

J.B.Heaton (1975) thought that: "Cloze tests measure the reader's ability to decode interrupted or mutilated message by making the most acceptable substitutions from all the contextual clues available. [J.Heaton, 1988, p.86] Now, cloze tests are considered by linguists as an economical way of measuring overall ability in language.

Although similar in appearance to completion items, cloze tests should not be confused with simple blank-filling tests. In ordinary completion tests the words for deletion are selected subjectively (consisting largely of structural words in tests of grammar and key content words in vocabulary or reading tests). In cloze tests, however, the words are deleted systematically. That means that once the actual text has been chosen the construction of cloze tests is purely mechanical: every nth word is deleted by the test writer. Certain test writers argue that the blank substituted for the deleted words should correspond to the length of the missing word but in most cloze tests all the blanks are now of uniform length.

The intervals at which words are deleted are usually between every fifth and tenth word. However, if every seventh word has been deleted in the first few sentences, then every seventh word must be deleted for the rest of the text. The fifth, sixth and seventh words are the most widely favored for deletion in cloze tests. If every third or forth word is deleted, the students will have extreme difficulty in understanding the text as insufficient clues will be available. If every tenth or twelfth word is deleted, it will be necessary to have a long text and it will be too easy.

E.g. Los Angeles, (Routers) - Weeks after_____________ Spears landed a reported $ 1 book deal comes word that ________________ sassy teen pop sensation will be making her first feature film.

After considering numerous movie_____________ , Spears, 19, has accepted a ____________role in a coming-of-age story _______________be co-produced by her music , Jive Records, entertainment trade paper_______________ Hollywood Reporter said on Wednesday. _______________ as-yet-untitled film, budgeted about $10_________ , is scheduled to start shooting______________March with a little-known director, Tamra Davis, ___________________the helm, the Reporter said. Spears',____________ Jive Records and Filmco, the ________________

Angeles production company said to_______________co-financing the project, had no,________________comment.

Spears, who is expected sing in the film, will ______________ a straight-laced high school student ________________ends up on a cross- country ____________with two childhood friends — one cheer____________ leader, the other a burnout.

C-test. C-test is an alternative to the popular cloze procedure used to test reading comprehension as well as overall language competence. it consists of four or six short, preferably authentic, texts in the target language, to which "the rule of two" has been applied: the second half of every second word has been deleted, beginning with the second word of the second sentence; the first and the last sentences are left intact. If a word has an odd number of letters, the "bigger" part is omitted, e.g. proud becomes pr ___________. One-letter words, such as "I" are ignored in the counting. The students' task is to restore the missing parts. In a typical C-test there are 100 gaps. Only entirely correct restorations are accepted.

By way of illustration, here is a short C-test:

KIEV, Ukraine - A beheaded body found in a forest near Kiev was most likely that of a missing journalist critical of the Ukraine government, the country's chief prosecutor has said.

Mykhailo Potebenko s ______ DNA t_________from Heorhiy Gongadze M _________99.6 p _________that of his m _____________ But some сі ____________such as the body's d________ rate r________ more i_________that r_________to be s_______and he could not "ca_______"

state it was the co___________________journalist, Potebenko a____________.

He also said experts had not determined whether mysterious audio tapes, purportedly of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma discussing ways to silence Gongadze, were authentic.

A teacher must try to give realistic tasks for students to perform in tests. It is necessary to avoid traditional tests in which students are instructed to read a text and simply talk about it. Instead, a teacher should give a task which students might actually perform in real life.