The news is perhaps the most common thing for language learners to read in English, but it needs to be chosen carefully and read correctly for this to be manageable and effective. This article gives thirteen tips on selecting news sources, reading them the right way, then learning the language that they present.
Deciding if news is the best thing to read or not
Many people read the news in English without thinking about whether that is really what they want to and should be reading. News has the advantage of a wide range of vocabulary that often reoccurs, and the same topics possibly coming up in conversation, for example in your future English classes. However, reading the news is less useful as preparation for normal English conversation such as small talk, for reading in English language exams, for people who aren’t that interested in news even in their own language, for people who need more basic vocabulary first, etc. As the stories are quickly gone and replaced by others, it may also be that the language stays in your head less successfully than it would if you read fiction such as graded readers based on famous movies.
How to make reading the news in English easier
Reading local news
Reading English-language news from your country, city, region, etc is easier because you are likely to be more familiar with the background to the story and it may be written at least partly by someone from your country. It may also be more useful than reading news from the USA, etc, because such news stories are more likely to come up in conversation. It will also teach you common English ways of explaining things from your country like the names of political parties and famous buildings.
Preparing before reading the news
With less familiar news stories and sources, you can make the experience more similar to reading about your own country by doing some prep first such as reading about it in your own language before you start reading about it in English or reading the Wikipedia page on the general topic.
Reading graded news
Reading news that is written or rewritten for language learners is not only easier, but should also meant that more common and therefore more useful vocabulary has been used. Cultural information that you might not be familiar with is also often explained.
Following the same news story
As long as it doesn’t become boring, reading more about the same disaster, war, political scandal, etc, is likely to bring up the same vocabulary, making it both easier and good revision. Reading another version of the same story on the same day is especially good for this, and is also very interesting because it shows how people’s points of view can vary.
Where to read the news in English
Even using the tips above to make reading the news easier, you may find the structure of English newspaper stories a bit strange until you get used to it. More than other languages such as Japanese, English news stories tend to start with the newest news and then work back, with the background coming later. This also means that they aren’t a good model for your own English writing and are unlike reading in English language exams like IELTS. You might therefore find it easier and/ or more useful to read stories that summarise and give more background on the news such as stories from news magazines such as Newsweek and Time.
When it comes to actual newspapers, ones which look difficult such as broadsheet financial newspapers tend to actually be easier than tabloids with lots of colour pictures, as the latter have lots of idioms, jokes in the headlines, etc. Best of all are kind of mid-market/ mid-brow ones which are more serious without being too heavy.
How to read the news in English
As with all kinds of reading in English, you can make sure that the experience is not too boring and is like real-life reading but also produces useful language to learn. This can be done by reading at natural speed just for enjoyment, interest and general comprehension, but underlining language that you’d like to look up later as you do so.
This way of reading is best done on paper, as it easier to underline. In addition, the fact that it is more difficult to look words up if you aren’t using an electronic device makes it easier to resist stopping each time that something is difficult to understand.
How much news to read in English
A good time to stop is when you have between ten and twenty new words or expressions to learn, which should hopefully mean a little more reading each day as your vocabulary increases.
You could also set yourself increasing challenges, e.g. five minutes a day in the the first week, six minutes per day in the next week, etc.
Stopping reading news stories/ Giving up on news stories
Because of how English news stories are usually organised with the newest info first and then things you might already know or fewer people need to know later, it is very normal to start at the top of each story and stop whenever it is boring to you. You therefore shouldn’t be shy to stop and move onto something else whenever you like.
What to do after reading the news in English
Learning useful language from the news
If you follow the methods above, you should have a list of words and expressions that you looked up later. However, you will find that some of these are less than useful, e.g. things that turned out to be place names or jargon that was explained elsewhere in the text, something that can be avoided by using a paper dictionary and ignoring words that don’t appear in it.
Once you have eliminated such useless vocabulary, the rest of the words or phrases can be transferred to a list of words to learn, flashcards, a flashcard app, etc.
Recycling the language of the news
As well as memorising the vocabulary and reading related stories, you can work on learning the language by writing about or talking about the same stories. For instance, you could write about your reactions to the story in your English diary, or start a study group who all read news stories to present and discuss the next time that you meet.
What to read next
As mentioned above, it is often best to read more about the same story or the same kind of news to make that reading easier and useful for learning the new language in it. However, it is also good to sometimes read completely different stories to make sure that your range of vocabulary doesn’t become uneven, e.g. to make sure that you are learning business and economics vocabulary too, not all crime vocabulary. Similarly, it is even better to mix in some other completely different study such as watching documentaries and reading fiction.
Re-reading the news
Although it might seem boring, it can be interesting to come back to the exact same news story a week later or a month later to see how much you remember and to see how the news situation has changed since then.