Sean Banville's Blog

My ISTEK 2010 presentation

Bringing news stories and teaching current events in the classroom has been a major part of my teaching over the past 17 years. Students requested I teach them news back in 1993. This led to my teacher colleagues asking for my news handouts. In 2004, this resulted in my creating a website that provided materials based on the latest, breaking news.

My adventures in news provided the background for my presentation at the ISTEK International ELT Conference in Istanbul on March 27. I spoke about the incredible versatility of current events as classroom content, and how its ubiquity in our lives makes it an authentic and engaging source of material.

What follows is a summary of the first half of my presentation (with selected slides).

Teachers’ salaries quadruple

This three-word headline catches our attention. We want to know more, immediately. I guess it would take over our every thought until we read the story and find out if we could really earn as much as a car loans manager in a bank.

We want to read the story. We will do our utmost to get a hold of it and read it. We will contact friends, go online, delay going to bed for an hour or two in the hope it appears on the TV news.

Naturally, our students also want to know more and read more. Teaching materials based on news can arouse great desire in students to want to engage with the story and the teacher-created activities. For me, the key to this engagement has been to use local or regional news stories that students identify with and use their own L1 knowledge of (their schemata).

I have to add here that I teach news stories to elementary level learners. Of course it has to be graded. I always find it’s very motivating for these learners to be reading the news in another language.

News is the biggest story:

This slide shows a Google search I did the day before my presentation. I could not find another noun that provided more search results than ‘news’. It thus makes great sense to me to use news in the classroom. Naturally, I rely more on my own experiences and successes with news materials.

I must share with you my presentation joke related to this slide. That is… my surprise at the number of people interested in the saxophone. Attendees in my first presentation laughed. Those in my later one looked at me a bit strangely, so I very quickly moved to the next slide.

A news syllabus

Themes

I demonstrated how news lends itself to a syllabus. I asked participants to write down on their handout as many collocations as they could that precede the word ‘news’. I then asked them to compare their list with this slide. This provided the basis for the themes that could be taught in this syllabus.

Functions

I then asked everyone to write down as many feelings, emotions etc news creates in them. They compared their lists with this slide. These words could be the basis to practice functional language (expressing anger, delight, sadness…).

Sources of materials

This slide showed where teachers can get news stories from – their classroom materials.

Other strands of the syllabus

I didn’t ask participants to write down the endless possible topics and items vocabulary associated with news because they’d probably still be there now. I did talk about how news presents interesting possibilities to teach grammar. Because stories break, develop, continue and twist and turn over days, weeks, months and years, there is ample chance to practice and recycle all kinds of grammar.

I’ll leave it for you to think about or write down the possible grammar that could be taught in these stages of Barack Obama’s career:

Skills and literacies

Apart from the traditional four skills (plus vocabulary and pronunciation), news requires us to teach students other skills and literacies. One I find interesting is what I called “bias literacy” – looking at reporting from different cultures to find different biases.

Testing

I also use news stories for exam practice. I have recreated KET and PET-style exams using my graded news stories. I continually find students engage with these materials more than they do with commercial, Anglo-centric materials. I think local stories really engage student interest.

My next post will be on ideas for teaching news in the classroom.

Click here for the full Powerpoint.