Using ‘Glocal News’ to Develop Students’ Reading and Speaking Skills.

Using ‘Glocal News’ to Develop Students’ Reading and Speaking Skills.

ÖZÇINAR-SIREL, Nazan

With the improvement of technology, many young people regard themselves as non-readers because they would rather engage in getting information from other forms of media such as the Internet, television, advertising, music, movies, video games and other digital realities. Therefore, teachers are constantly thinking of challenging ways to assign tasks that students can perform with these digital gadgets. Teachers are also aware of the fact that students need to be exposed to reading materials as much as possible so that they can improve their level of English. It is difficult to envisage a language- teaching programme without any reading tasks assigned to students. Whether teachers assign their students to read graded reader tasks or newspaper articles does not make any difference. It is a known fact that students will improve their reading skills with any reading tasks assigned to them. Therefore, reading newspaper articles is an effective way that teachers can use with their intermediate level of students to improve their reading skills. Unfortunately, we are not much of a reading society and we don’t even read a newspaper regularly in our mother tongue let alone in English. ‘Glocal News’ is one way of these challenging tasks designed for students at the intermediate level to encourage students to read online newspaper articles that they are interested in and present it online as a summary activity on MOODLE, an online open source known also as Course Management Systems (CMS). This workshop attempts to suggest an innovative approach to reading online newspaper articles to create online video journals.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05-04

995