Monday, November 16, 2009

Reading and Globalization

I am trying to convince my older students of the importance of reading a weekly magazine from one of the Spanish newspapers so as to know what´s going on in the world. I would like to make them understand how important it is to keep up to date on current issues in order to be able to interact with anyone anywhere and, at the same time, be better prepared for their university entrance exam, where they will have to discuss and analyse some texts on different topics.
I took to class some issues of Time and of El Semanal, the Sunday magazine that comes with a popular newspaper in our region, La Voz de Galicia .
I wanted to make them see how globalization affects what we read: when there is a piece of news about a general topic, we very often find the same articles in both magazines; the Spanish version is usually a translation of the English one (the articles are published in the USA first) and the differences sometimes lie in the size of the photographs. Judge by yourselves (click on the photos to get a larger image):





Sometimes even the cover is the same:



We do read articles in English from a number of magazines and newspapers for our English classes but I´m afraid they consider this kind of reading "class work" and what I mean to encourage is reading to improve their general knowledge and, eventually, for pleasure.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...