Newspapers are flexible language teaching aids

I was thrilled to read the article titled "Reading newspapers will help hone language skills" published on Nov 11, 2020, as it brought me down memory lane. I still remember when, in my primary school days, we had a programme called Newspaper in Education (NIE) in which The News Straits Times pioneered efforts to allow students to buy the newspaper weekly at discounted rates.

My English teacher ensured that we made maximum use of the newspaper in the classroom. We had activities like cutting and pasting new vocabulary into our exercise books, writing sentences from selected pictures and photos for writing skills, and not forgetting the reading aloud of individual segments of selected articles.

Newspapers are one of the most powerful tools if we intend to improve the mastery of English, as it will improve vocabulary, grammar, and of course, ideas for writing essays. Activities like identifying main ideas, comparing readings, forming new phrases and sentences from vocabulary collections, and writing summaries allow for interaction with authentic materials found in the newspaper, which gradually improves proficiency in English.