Students will then be asked who condemned the
Israelis and support their answers with some
evidence:
a) The Palestinians
b) The United Nations
c) The Organization of Islamic Conference
d) Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
e) The US President
If teachers supply newspaper articles to students with
the headlines removed, the students will then be
asked to come out with their own headlines using a
passive structure. According to O’Sullivan (1999), the
use of the passive structure is to create a sense of
distance, formality and to make the meaning of an
utterance more impersonal. This enables learners to
understand the context much better.
4) Learning of Verb Tenses
Articles extracted from newspapers can be used for
exercises of verb tenses. It is important for the
teacher/lecturer to select the correct passage to suit
the interest and need of the students. The articles
selected for the students should have a short
amusing account of an incident or be an anecdote
that can make the student enjoy reading it. This helps
students understand the passage faster and learn
tenses more effectively as shown in the following
example:
The students are divided into small groups with a leader
appointed in each group. They study the comics or
cartoons closely and then invent their own stories and give
their own names to the characters in the stories. The
stories are then read in the classroom. Later on, the
teacher /lecturer in the classroom will ask the students to
paste comics or cartoons in the exercise books and write
out their stories. In addition, teachers or lecturers can
choose some cartoon pictures and put them in disarranged
order. Students are then asked to put them back into its
correct sequence based on their understanding of the
cartoon pictures. This can be fun and interesting to
challenge the students' interpretation of the cartoon
pictures.
6) Tour Advertisement Guide
Using information from a tour advertisement to plan a
holiday may be interesting. Each student has the tour
advertisement taken from his/her newspaper. The teacher
in the classroom asks the students some general
questions about the advertisement. After this, the students
are given the opportunity to explain why they prefer such a
particular tour. This activity will help students elicit a lot of
expressions and information. In addition, they may gain
knowledge about the culture or custom about the particular
country that they are keen on. A tour advertisement can
also be used in a dialogue in which one student plays the
role of a tourist-to-be and the other plays the role of a clerk
who works in a travel agency
7) The TV Guide
Possibly the world’s least successful tourist is Mr
Nicholas Scotti, an Italian living in San Francisco.
Some years ago, he (1) _________ (decide) to fly
back to Italy to visit relatives. During the journey, the
plane (2) ________ (make) a one-hour stop at
Kennedy Airport. Thinking he (3) __________ (arrive)
in Italy, Mr Scotti (4) __________ (get) out of the
plane and (5) ________ (spend) the whole day in
New York thinking he was in Rome. The great
traveller (6) ________ (notice) that modernization (7)
___________ (destroy) many of Rome’s ancient
buildings and he later (8) ________ (tell) friends that
he (9) __________ (be) surprised so many people
(10) __________ (speak) English. In fact, Mr Scotti‘s
English is rather limited but when he (11) _________
(ask) a police officer for direction, he (12) ________
(manage) to choose an officer who (13) ________
(emigrate) from Italy several years before, and so
(14) ___________ (be) able to answer in fluent
Italian.
By reinforcing students to do this type of exercise will
help sustain their interest in learning tenses and they
can comprehend better and use the tenses correctly.
5) Cartoon /Comics
Some interesting cartoons or comics that appear in
the newspaper can be used to elicit students’
responses to telling stories. The conversation in the
cartoons or comics is deleted. Photocopies of