Mass Media and Education

Searching newspapers and other mass media online to check the usefulness and relevance of the resources available was also a very dynamic part of this training course about the multimedia resources in the teaching of English as a second language.

1- Our first challenge was to analyse the impact of the Oscars night on four newspapers. Two of them are British: The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian Online. The others are American: Newsweek and New York Times.

While the American newspapers gave no prominence to the event on their homepage, with just a simple piece of information included in a list of general information on cinema and no photos, both British media emphasised this worldwide famous night with headlines, captioned pictures and even with a video of the ceremony,in The Daily Telegraph, unfortunately not available any longer.

This difference of approach arose some curiosity and made us check another British publisher, The Mirror, to come to the conclusion that the Oscars night was also treated with great significance. The truth is that, as someone suggested, the winners of the night are British.

2- As a second challenge of the session we skimmed a newspaper online for children we chose   timeforkids.com. We focused on the resources and tested out its possibilities of classroom uses. The website seemed colourful, usable and motivating. This material could be used to develop different skills either in a lesson of the unit about the topic Multicultural world or as a warmer or follow-up work inside the same topicand maybe as background information and practice for the extensive reading "Names" by Maya Angelou.

Concluding, the mass media online can be an important help whenever we want to use authentic models (texts, videos, images or even audio materials) and introduce some pedagogical innovation in our activity. There’s a wide range of resources to develop the different skills – listening, writing, reading, grammar, vocabulary, any other.