News

Learn English through News

Reading news articles is a common habit. We read news every day to keep ourselves updated with latest development around the world. We have news resources from different platforms, including newspaper, radio, television, internet or social media. If your interest is to follow current affairs, you definitely can easily capitalise on it to improve your language skills.

News articles are great sources to learn languages. News topics are usually current and are constantly being updated. There will always be plenty of topics that interest you and are able to help improve your language skills.  News stories are written in a concise and easy-to-understand manner which could become an advantage for people with busy and hectic lifestyles to digest a topic or read them to learn a language. Here we provide five ways to learn English through news reading.

1. Pick and read news topics that interest you

By choosing news topics that interest you, chances are you are more likely to remember new English vocabularies and develop English language skills from interesting news topics. For instance, if Sports is your favourite subject, do choose sports-related topics by going to newspaper’s sports section that provides latest sports news.

2. Choose news topics that you are familiar with

If you enjoy reading news, you would most likely choose the topics that you are familiar with. It could be a story happening in places you live or a story which is related to your daily lives. As you won’t find the topics too hard to understand, it would be an advantage for you to learn new words or pick up English-related knowledge from these stories.

However, if you are a non-native English learner or a beginner-level learner, you might also wish to read the news in your respective mother tongue, and read the story again in English. Through this method, it will help to develop your English skills tremendously.

3. Predict news stories

If you are reading articles and listening to news broadcasts, you can try to develop your reading and listening skills by making own predictions. We would recommend that you read or listen to headlines first, and then give yourself time to think about what information will be provided. You can make predictions using the words and phrases, combined with information that you already know. As you continue to read until the end, you can check again if your predictions match the story. This process can keep you interested in the news stories.

4. Identify and analyse main points

While you can use headlines to think and predict news stories, we do recommend you to skim through and read the whole article quickly. Worry not when you see new words or phrases as this is only to get an overview of the news story. Once you have a general understanding of the news story, you can read it once again to focus on learning these English vocabularies.

5. Develop English vocabularies

News stories usually contain more vocabularies than the usual English stories as they involve many topics ranging from current affairs to lifestyle.  You can always search new words or vocabularies in a dictionary and understand them by translating them into words in your own native language though you can always try to guess the meaning from the article, then check it again in the dictionary and translate.

Above are some of the useful tips you can learn to learn English through news more effectively and efficiently.

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