Incorporating current events and news articles in ESL classrooms

Аннотация

This paper is mainly based on improving language learners’ reading comprehension with the help of news-based articles taken from the newspapers. It also discusses the research findings regarding to the students’ performance during EFL classes. Key words: a news-based course, news media source, cognitive awareness, news stories. 260 Topical issues of language training in the globalized world In the field of Second Language (ESL) education, educators are constantly seeking innovative methods to engage students and enhance language acquisition. One effective strategy gaining traction is the incorporation of current news articles into ESL classrooms. This approach not only improves language skills but also fosters a deeper understanding of the world, encouraging critical thinking and cultural awareness. This research paper is aimed at finding out advantages of using authentic current news articles in ESL classrooms and how it can benefit students and teacher in fostering their language proficiency. The standard way of teaching students for a second language often fails to cover the current issues and global events being happened around the world. Most of the teachers usually stick to their curriculum textbooks and give detailed information about certain units as well. Even students may be engaged during those classes and doing well during exams. But it is the fact that those students who are good at school curriculum books often make errors when it comes to speak in that language in everyday situations. It is clear how important it is to use authentic materials such as current event news articles during the classes in order to foster students’ language proficiency. Current issues that involve different stakeholders are by nature meaningful in that they generate multiple and competing answers. By including multiple informed perspectives, current events are key to classroom discussions because students learn to express themselves, challenge one another’s ideas, and revise their understandings (Karon LeCompte, Brooke Blevins, and Brandi Ray, 2017). Making class discussions about current events can help students to be productively engaged in the social and political situations by giving their own ideas on certain issues. Furthermore, Gilmore (2007) rightly warns that authentic material can come in many different forms and “authentic” is not synonymous with quality or even appropriateness; indeed, authentic materials ought to be carefully selected just as any other classroom material should be. If the selected materials are too abstract or contain too many low-frequency words 261 Topical issues of language training in the globalized world (Widdowson, 1998), the resulting materials do not yield many benefits for students. That said, authentic materials can promote cognitive awareness and lower affective filters (Bacon & Finnemann, 1990) and present valuable learning opportunities as long as high-challenge tasks are accompanied by high support (Mariani, 1997). Authentic materials are real world materials carefully prepared and adapted to teach English which include novels, films, newspapers, brochures, pamphlets, magazines and so on. Nunan (1999) defines authentic materials as, “Any spoken or written materials which are not for pedagogical purposes”. Newspapers are also useful for the learners as well as the teachers to reflect changes that take place in the language and they keep up pace with such changes. Newspapers are linguistically up-to-date and provide latest information with precious linguistic data and are used for a wide range of language styles and text types which are very rarely found in the prescribed textbooks. Newspapers also provide many variations in written English that is more important for the learners to learn the language with a variety in their written English as the learners get progress in their studies (Parupalli Srinivas Rao, 2019). In this research, the main subjects were mainly university students studying in two different groups with the same level of language comprehension (B2). Each group consists of 15 students, one is experimental, the next is a control group. The research tool which was used at the beginning of the experiment was an online survey which consists of 10 questions. These questions are mainly based on finding out how frequently students come across daily-news articles, do they like to read such articles, which topics they are interested in reading news, and challenges they are facing in doing reading tasks. According to the survey 80% of students are interested in reading news articles but find it difficult to understand the authentic materials often. In the next step, the author took a pre-test, to check students’ overall comprehension in reading. The pre-test consists of 40 questions such as multiple choice, matching heading, matching information, gap-filling, summary completion. And the level of the test was advanced, the same for each group. In order to evaluate stud