CURRENT EVENTS!  How do we as the keystone species in the classroom present the massive amounts of info in online newspapers?
We're talking about using online newspaper resources
Current events - Op Ed, or Compare Front Pages (What is covered? What takes priority?)
Ss in groups - 3-5
different NPs
-See how same event is reported in different news sources.
Teacher roles in this:
How do we make this successful?  Try to check left/right leaning newspapers.  What is the Op Ed ideological spin?
-Look for differences between news sources.  
-Things to emphasize (genres):

• Compare differences in angles.
• Compare to US press
• What is the news focus?  Internat'l, Nat'l, Local?
• Look at wording for same event.  (i.e. rebels or freedom fighters?  insurgents or the opposites? Terrorists or liberators?)
• How are things described?  Is it positive or negative?
• "Big words" (2nd 3rd semester), use of hedges, or other mitigators (more advanced - appraisal theory a la Belz 2003)
• Students can be let loose on several NPs at once.
• Corpus analysis for collocations and things in different papers (word frequency, collocation)

- Vocab learning

• Low/intermediate
  • Headlines
  • Cognates, familiar words - designate high frequency words you don't know
  • Sentence initials, logical connectors
• Advanced
  • Guessing meaning from context
  • Summarize features
  • Families of related words (semantic collocation)
  • Text as repository of vocab.
  • Genre differences (vocab. level) between different types of columns/ articles.
  • Argumentation markers for Op-Ed pieces - do they appear in "unbiased" expository texts?
  • How do you present the same event as expository or Op Ed?

- Advertisements

• What do people want?  What do they buy?

- Personals
- Classifieds

• Apartments
• Other things for sale

- Forums

• i.e. Hanna and de Nooy (2003)
• Have students READ first (so they can participate in the arguments effectively)
• Clue students in that they don't have to present themselves as students.  Rather, just show interest in topic at hand.
• They can clarify that their lang. might not be up to par, but after that, GO FOR IT!

- Horoscopes

-> Activity possibilities

• Class-created Wiki
• Have students make their own newspaper (could also be inter-class, inter-cultural, inter-level!!!)

March 17th- ICC in FLL

What is the rationale/goals for using Internet comm. in FLL?

• Authenticity (e.g. access to peer-aged experts)
• Culture:
  • Getting to know your own culture thru the eyes of the other
  • "Third space" (Kramsch)
  • cross-cultural vs. interlanguage pragmatics
  • culural diffs/similarities
  • cultural concepts (e.g. CULTURA project)
  • linguistic codes
  • stereotypes as ice-breaker (prove/disprove)
• Doing:
  • Task-based (e.g. changes in urban space, i.e. concept of supermarche and strip malls)
  • Student-generated tasks (e.g. everyday life for students; i.e. sex, drug, and rock and roll;)
  • Have Ss discuss expectations of parnerships before it starts
  • Prepare Ss for such mismatches in linguistic skills
  • Prepare Ss for using language within genre of CMC
  
  
• Taking micro-interactional concepts and mapping them onto larger macro-interactional concepts (e.g. linking grammatical structures in foreign language to that of the L1)

Constraints of such partnerships?

• Mismatch (e.g. linguistic skills)