Strategies for teaching language
In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of teaching language via coloring books.
This post will provide strategies for teaching and assessing comprehension of news articles or videos when teaching adults.
Choose an authentic resource
A strategy for teaching language by using news sources, whether a newspaper or video news bulletin is a great way to facilitate adult learning.
Whether it is English as a Second Language or a foreign language, the newspaper is a great resource for real-world language.
Choose a television station or radio program that caters to a native audience as well.
So how does one choose a news resource? It is important to choose an authentic resource which is news written by a native for the natives.
The news has real-world language which is critical to the learning process.
Articles specifically created to teach language do not use real-world language even though they may cater to the appropriate proficiency levels.
They miss out on dialect differences, or in the case of audio/video accent and pronunciation varieties.
These differences are great for preparing your adult student to communicate effectively.
Request copyright permission
If you are planning to sell your language lessons, you need to write to major news publications or magazines for copyright permission to use their articles.
Make sure to use appropriate proficiency level sources
When creating your material make sure you choose the source according to the proficiency levels required by either the industry or the particular company.
There are standard proficiency levels for foreign and English languages.
A newspaper will usually have factual information which ranks lower to intermediate on the standard scales of proficiency.
While the information in a news magazine or editorial will have higher levels of language requiring the student to infer information from the content.
Refer to the industry standards when selecting your source material.
The Interagency Language Roundtable, which the United States uses has descriptions of each level for foreign languages.
While the WIDA also has descriptors for the English Language proficiency levels.
Teach the nuances of culture along with language
Authentic News brings out the nuances in culture.
For example, how Delhiites think is slightly different from Mumbaites.
This difference is seen in colloquial phrases, voice intonations, and accents.
It is impossible to teach language without culture and doing so would be a disservice to your student.
Bring the student up to date
Teaching via the news also keeps the student abreast with current affairs in the target language country.
If the news is an opinion piece on a current event, it is great for higher levels as you can test the comprehension of the student on whether they understand the subtle biases of the author or reporter.
Note: It is important to remember that if preparing your students for an assessment, choose the news source that has the standard language.
Start with a brainstorming activity
Activate the student’s prior knowledge by showing a picture or an audio or video clip and ask the student to guess the news topic.
Use this graphic organizer to capture the information.
This KWL organizer is also good for brainstorming and for the next activity as well.
Use a skimming activity
This activity will test overall comprehension of the topic.
Use the whole article and have the students quickly read it over just to get the gist of the article.
Then, create multiple-choice questions to test comprehension of the overall message of the article.
Dig deeper into the article
Create activities such as filling in the blanks, sorting sentences in sequence, or multiple choice questions to facilitate comprehension of details in the article.
This is a good time to encourage and facilitate inference and critical thinking.
Provide related topics for the students to get a larger idea and frame of reference to the current topic.
Next, fill in blanks activity is a great one for teaching vocabulary.
Or multiple choice activities are great for testing details of the news topic. Have at least 2-3 of these kinds of comprehension activities in the lesson.
Create a Teacher’s Note
A backstory is essential for the students to obtain cultural references or political and social relevance to the topic.
Speaking of stories, check out my Teaching Language Through Stories series on Amazon.
Create a summarizing activity
Finally, assess overall comprehension by asking the students to summarize the topic with this graphic organizer.
For more details, look out for my courses on how to create a 5 activity lesson to test comprehension.
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