Many people don’t realize that The New York Times can be quite accessible for English Language Learners. Due to its focus on current events and news, using The Times to learn vocabulary and practice reading can be much more inviting and rewarding than a textbook. And NYTimes.com has some extra tools and features that are particularly useful for language learning.
Here are 10 ideas for using The Times to teach and learn the English language.
1. Look It Up — An easy way to get ELL’s started with The Times: Use the “look up” function, which allows users to instantly access the definition of any word in an article on NYTimes.com. Read the first four paragraphs of the entry Big Fancy Words in the After Deadline blog to learn about this function. As the blog explains, simply double click on any word in a full Times article (it doesn’t work on article summaries, headlines or blog posts) and then click on the question mark icon that appears. You’ll be linked to not only a dictionary definition (which includes an audio pronunciation of the word), but also to other related reference work entries.
Explore a new word from an NYTimes.com or New York Times Global Edition article every day, and track the words you learn using our Vocabulary Log–you can use the “look up” feature to fill in the dictionary definition section. Challenge yourself, too, to use every new word in conversation and/or writing each day.
More advanced readers of English may want to try the Learning Network’s Word of the Day feature and our ideas for developing vocabulary and construing meaning.
2. Ifs, Ands and Buts — The little words are sometimes the hardest! Start reading a NYTimes.com news article and you won’t get far before you see articles and prepositions like “a,” “the,” “in,” “on” and “at.” They are easy to read and understand in context, but when it comes time to write, these little words can create big problems for non-native speakers. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a useful resource for English language learning and writing skills–its ESL Instructors and Students section is especially useful for ELL’s. Take a look at How to Use Articles and Prepositions for Time and Place. Then test your understanding: Have a partner take out all of the articles and prepositions from several Times articles, and see whether you can fill them in correctly.
Parts of speech in general can be confusing to many English language learners. For a fun overview of the challenges of the language, see Ben Yagoda’s guest entry for the Times Magazine’s On Language column.
Read more at The New York Times
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