Reading the Ri Bao (newspaper)

Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed under Lesson Plans & Ideas, language learning, language teaching

I get two copies of the People’s Daily Overseas edition (all in Chinese) delivered to me a week from the Chinese Consulate free of charge. I don’t spend time reading the newspaper as it would take me hours to do so, but I have kept collecting it as I thought it was a great authentic resource. But, how would I use it with the kids? It’s way too hard for them to read, so what to do with it?

Well, this term we are focussing our study on making Chinese characters less confusing. I’m teaching the kids in all year levels certain groups of characters and teaching them how to put two characters together to make one character (eg: 女 + 子 = 好 or 田 + 力 = 男), and how to put two characters side by side to make a new word (eg: 火 + 车 = 火车). They are all getting it really well, and can now see that Chinese characters don’t have to be so confusing and they are more than just a bunch of random black lines. They have been getting really excited about how many character they know and how many more they’ve got to learn before they finish the grid I’ve given them. Over the past couple of days I have given most classes a page of the newspaper to give their character identification skills a good test.

As you can see in this picture, each student had a page layed out in front of them, and, armed with a texta, they had to look through and highlight all the characters they could recognise. They seemed to have a great time and were surprised at how many they could pick out! The best thing about it was that lots of students were asking me what new characters meant and then going and highlighting what they had just learned which was great. One Year 8 boy must have felt that he achieved a lot that particular lesson because he said something along the lines of learning not being so hard when you make an effort. Hmm, who have I heard say that before I wonder?…

My Grade P/1 and Grade 2 class are full of particularly clever little munchkins who have taken on lots of new characters really really well this term. Theyloved finding characters in the paper and I’ve sent them home with the challenge of teaching Mum and or Dad what the word for China looks like in Chinese.

Some ideas for how to use a target language newspaper (or magazine) in your LOTE classroom

simply get the students to locate the words they know. This is great activity for character recognition if that is the sort of language you are teaching or a a great activity for quick reading and recognising new words
give students a particular list of words/characters they have to find and time them – it’s a race! The list of words could be given in English and found in a text in the LOTE or they could be given in a LOTE and found in an English newspaper or text.
Depending on their language level, you could get them to find the words they know and then make silly sentences out of those words

Newspapers and magazines are a great authentic resources for your classroom and can be used in many ways. The kids get a real buzz out of the fact they are looking at something ‘real’ and can understand words on it!

For other non-ICT lesson ideas check out these posts: Off To Market We Go! and Teaching Down the Line and Lightening the Load.