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Analyze first page for one full week, jotting down comments about content and layout of text and visuals. Have students or pairs of students select different papers, taking 10 minutes of every other class meeting to compare patterns.
Prepare brief FL resumes of selected news stories, telling in a sentence or two the subject and the degree of details given, as the story tells who, what, how, where, when and why. In essence,try to get the jist of a story and the general purpose of a group in cases of acronyms.
Discuss the visual aspects of each section:
photos/layout/number of items per page/advertising. What is your impression of audience. Compare with other papers analyzed in class, spending 15 minutes or so every other class.
In groups of four, assign pairs to research the same paper, as above, with one pair on Page One while others work on sections. Within one class then, taking 15 minutes every other day over two weeks, groups will be sharing information about a number of papers.
Read different language versions of one or two headline stories. Include sources from countries involved as well as two other countries in order to compare degree and type of coverage. An excellent resource for news from many countries is
Draw up a check list to encourage participation using any newspaper sources: i.e. find 2
pictures or drawings of specific people/places/foods/ads/TV shows/ current event topic from a certain time or date. Encourage students to save or bookmark valued sites.
For use in classes without on-site access to Internet, make one copy of all Internet resources for your project; xerox just enough for the number of groups (plus one for yourself) then use with all your classes. You might exchange materials with a colleague to get maximum use of resources.
Project 2:(Year to Date) without Internet Access:
After students are accustomed to the task, a week or so later, hold a class Newscast. Assign a strong student to be moderator. Moderator will open the broadcast, calling on reporters by country location and winding up the program within allotted time. You might film broadcasts after students gain skill in broadcasting and in delivery of resumes.
Use these broadcasts with beginning classes. Distribute entire headline sheet to group, play video of student-produced newscast, asking beginning students to number the stories in order.
Find a FL newspaper site with on-line archives of front page articles for the past year. Assign a different time segment, one month or a week for example, to each small group. The task will be to find two or three national or international reports for each time segment. Each group makes a written and oral summary of their news findings for an in-class time line visula project with perhaps an in-class oral or taped news show.
For French, an excellent source is MagNet: click on archives to pull up every daily headline story (Monday through Friday) to date in 1996.
Analyze sections of one national paper for 2 weeks, orally and in writing:
List the sections appearing in each issue. Note the space allotment and regularity of each (appears daily/one specific day per week).
Compare one national paper with two or more regional issues of that country appearing same day. Focus on page one and treatment of important headlines; compare and contrast regionals: describe text, photo layout and amount of information for each major story. Share your overall reactions.
Compare a US newspaper with a comparable paper from another country and chart page One for one week. Make a general comparison of each based on criteria given above.
Plan, try out and share with colleagues successful projects for beginning level students. For example, first year students can classify front page photos and headlines by general topics in the FL. Preview at least two papers to jot down vocabulary for making FL resumes of the news. Assign students in pairs to one computer and teach them how to save addresses by Bookmarking each. Then assign each pair a newspaper where they will identify photos and visuals, using simple FL.
This works well in all levels: small groups of beginners can each pick a story (one story per member of small group)from a pile of articles selected and mixed together by teacher to represent easily regognizable items from a time segment; students write name on story copy, spend 5 minutes getting date and general gist of each, without marking copy; each group then arranges one of their stories in a time line (lay out on the floor before finished lines will be mounted on a public display area);and tells who, what where and the general gist of the news story in a two to five sentence FL summary. Keep it short and collect the papers after this task. Return every day or regularly to this general task. By the third telling, students are well able to reconstruct the time line stories (identifying who, what where, with whom, the problem and the synopsis to date; add additional stories and pull out those that students have difficulty retelling smoothly. Have students bring in illustrations or cut-outs from local papers related key figures and settings in your news line. Have students record and video a news program to accompany press releases. Share with your other classes and lend to colleagues for their class use.Putnam's Teaching Activities for Headlines:
Print up today's daily headlines, cut into strips by country and distribute to students in class. (For French classes, Les Titres work well). On a weekly basis, you might instead assign regions of the world to individuals or small groups. They would save the headline site on their main drive Bookmark to update when out of class.
In class, individuals or pairs take five minutes to prepare resumes then five more minutes to share orally their event.
For 5 minutes bullet bulletins, hand out complete sheet to each student. Then elicit specifics by having individuals fill in information orally. For example, you say in FL "today Bill Clinton in a meeting with"; student answers "Jacques Chirac". Gesture or ask for elaboration to elicit,"the President of France". The point is to encourage students to paraphrase the news or to elaborate and extend statements made by others. A good paired activity too.
Read daily headlines and resumes of news, especially headlines from the actual TV broadcast such as France 2 or France 3, prior to watching the broadcast of daily news from host
country. Teacher might record programs at home for class clips. Have students check off topics covered in both emissions and comment aloud, comparing video and Internet versions. Make strips of stories or xerox stories out of order onto one sheet for student groups to enumerate during the video.
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