Newspapers are an incredible resource for ESL teachers as they are up to date, topical and students can see a direct link to the real world through them. But, how can you actually use newspapers to teach grammar?
Newspapers can be used to teach grammar by: converting them into gap-fill or error correction exercises focussed around a specific grammar point, or as a model of how certain elements of grammar should be used.
With newspapers taking both online and offline formats there are a few methods you can use to get the most out of what is essentially free ESL material. Let’s take a closer look at how to do it.
Ways To Teach ESL With Newspapers
Here are a few of my favourites, some require more preparation than others but if you store your files well they will be there for future use.
The Cloze/Gap Fill Approach
Probably the simplest approach to take is to choose a grammar focus point, such as, ‘the correct use of articles a, and, and the’. Then, simply extract them all from an article and replace them with a blank line.
You can then give students the article to fill-in. You can tell them how many there are of each word and you can/should work through the first few with them in order to show what they need to do and explain any relevant grammar rules that will help them.
Of course this can be differentiated by having different versions with more blank spaces.
Create An Error Correction Exercise
As it sounds, select a grammar point you wish to focus on and then edit the article so that there are numerous errors with that grammar point throughout the article.
Be sure to keep an unedited copy of the article so students can check the answers afterwards. I prefer to highlight the answers/words I have changed in red so that students can quickly check their answers.
I like to do this with past tense forms of verbs, i.e. I might change all the past participles and past tense form of words into their base form. Students then have to correct them as best as they can.
Another easy alternative is taking out all of the plural ‘s’ letters, or all of the verb to be ‘am, is, are, was, were’ and letting students reinsert them.
I must stress, however, that with all of these activities it is important to have two or three differentiated versions, for low, medium and high ability students. There is nothing worse than one student racing through it getting everything correct and then sitting there twiddling their thumbs.
A few easy ways to differentiate with exercises like these is to give or not give the answer options for the gap fills, reduce, or increase the number of missing words, or simply use different texts for different levels that are more complex.
You might like: Do Native Speakers Make Grammar Mistakes?
Jumbled Up Paragraphs and Lines
Not so much a grammar exercise as a reading comprehension exercise. Depending on your objectives you can literally cut up the article between each line or each paragraph.
Students then have to read the lines, or paragraphs and sort them into the correct order. There knowledge of word order can be tested using this strategy and in order to explain the correct order at the end.
Take out the Punctuation
This is pretty much as it sounds. I would take out all of the punctuation from a text and turn capital letters into lower case letters.
This will then provide a ‘blank canvas’ for students to practise their grammar on and usually provides plenty of discussion points as there is usually more than one way to do this.
Of course, you could make this more specific and just take out commars, or exclamation marks or whatever your focus is. And if you really want to ‘have fun’ then give it to another teacher and see how different your reasons are and then debate who is correct in front of the class. Guaranteed fireworks!
Active to Passive
This one takes a little bit more preparation but is worth doing. Often newspaper articles include sections of passive voice, for example, bombs were exploded in the city centre on Monday. Your prep is to change these into active voice: On Monday in the city centre someone exploded bombs.
The students task is to then find those active voice sentences and change them into passive voice sentences.
Referencing Exercise
A common grammatical fault with ESL learners is that their writing gets confusing to read due to incorrect referencing, i.e. they use the words: them, they, it, there incorrectly when referring back to something they have talked about.
One way to highlight the importance of this skill is to have students go through a newspaper article and circle each referencing word, i.e. I, you, she, he, it, we, they, them, their and so on.
You can display a newspaper article and then circle each of these words drawing lines back to whatever person, or thing they are referring to.
You can then give out other articles, perhaps all surrounding a common theme/topic that you are vocabulary building around and get students to do the same thing.
You can follow this up with a cloze activity completely removing all of those words and having students attempt to replace them correctly.
Translate the news
Pretty much as it sounds. Allow students to surf a website in their native language and select an article that they are interested in.
After that their task is to select one of the main paragraphs of the text and translate the paragraph without the help of Google translate, or other online tools.
Once they have done this they partner up with someone else and they check each other’s translations and make any modifications they think need making.
Afterwards, the teacher can allow students to Google translate the article and see how closely matching the translations are and if there are any differences then which version is the best version and why.
Also try, 15 Speaking Projects and Activities For ESL Students
News Websites For Practising Grammar
There is no point reinventing the wheel either. Here are my favourte three websites when I want to use the news to teach ESL.
Breakingnewsenglish.com
A huge website that has thousands of articles all broken down into similar lessons revolving around comprehension questions, vocabulary matching activities and debates.
I prefer to print off the mini-lesson formats and use them as is, but each article also has a series of grammar exercises associated with it which are perfect for practising different points of grammar. It is usually located near the top of the page.
Sometimes I get students to screenshot their attempts at the exercises and paste them onto a google doc. I can then see that they have genuinely been attempting the grammar exercises and not just guessing or even lying to me! This actually worked pretty well through lock down and I still do it sometimes today.
Also try: Why are Writing Mechanics Important?
Newsinlevels.com
Each article featured on this site comes in three levels easy, medium or hard making it a perfect resource for a mixed ability group. The articles selected are usually not too long, around 300-400 words so as not to put off the second language reader and they also list out the most difficult words with their definitions after the article.
Furthermore, they usually provide a related video to go along with the article making it even more user friendly.
Whilst the articles are not posted for the main purpose of teaching grammar, they are mainly there for reading comprehension, they are very suitable for using with any of the methods mentioned previously on this page.
BBC Learning English
A shout out to BBC Learning English as well for a very comprehensive set of resources suitable for learning all aspects of English. There is an entire section devoted to grammar, mainly as a reference guide rather than as exercises to complete.
Whilst grammar is often seen as a boring topic to learn and teach, by shaping your lessons around real life news and/or topics your students are interested in then you can capture their interest alongside getting across your grammar points.
Recommended reading: 15 Engaging Online Speaking Activities
Image Credits
Saligao. Photo by Frederick Noronha. Fredericknoronha, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
