Using newspaper to enhance students' learning in ESL Classroom / Methodius Macdonald George Segie

Newspapers in the classroom helps to improve students reading, comprehension, promote self-study and enable students to express their own views and opinions, Newspapers also increase students' interest in what going on in a society and the world and broaden students' point of view and are able to have more opportunity to communicate about news and related matters at home or at school (Ajayi, 2002; Antepara, 2003; Guariento & Morley, 2001; Coelho, 2007; Pinkman, 2005; Crossley, 2007; Day, 2004). This study investigates the effectiveness of newspaper in the language classroom to foster student-centered activities, to enhance the students' vocabulary development and act as a platform for students to know and understand society at home and around the world. This study involved students in SK Wirajaya, Samarahan, Sarawak The apparent decline of English proficiency (Ministry of Education, 2004) among school students triggered the researcher to find out other alternative to reduce this deficiency. The subjects of the study were 48 of students in SK Wirajaya. These students were in Year 4Bestari and were of mixed level of proficiency. The study was conducted within a 3-week period (6 hours of formal English Lessons) and a local English newspaper; The Borneo Post, was used during the entire study. From the findings in the study it is clear that the use of newspaper in the classroom contributed to the active and creative involvement of students in participating in all activities employed by the students. Furthermore, newspaper also enhanced the development of students' vocabulary in a short period of time. In addition, newspaper has helped students to know about places around them either locally or abroad. The results of the study also imply that students were more comfortable with short texts with pictures and these texts were found to be related to students' past knowledge. In addition, the results of the study implies that students learned new word receptively through several factors such as frequency of exposure, repetitions, cognates and knowledge of related words. It was also observed that the activities had increased students' cooperation and understanding among themselves and it also encouraged passive students to be more active and motivated in learning the target language. This study is meant to ascertain the advantages of newspapers in the classroom and there are still a lot to be done in order to determine the effectiveness of newspapers to foster vocabulary learning and other learning skills such as reading and writing.