Newspapers

Newspapers online

• The Australian Financial Review 
• The Age 
• The Australian 
• The Herald Sun 
• ABC News online 

The daily newspapers are a useful way to improve your language because you will read about current issues that you could discuss with other people. You will also have access to the current language and culture from a newspaper article.

Newspaper reading skills

If you preview the article before you read it, you are likely to understand the article better.

How to preview an article:

First read the headline to get some idea about the type of article - news story, book review etc. Look at the picture Read the caption (the text under the picture). This gives you some information about the article and further prepares you to understand the information. Try to guess what you are likely to read in the article from what you have learned from the headline, picture and caption and from what you may already know about the topic.

Efficient reading

The key to efficient reading is to know your purpose for reading. Are you just looking for specific information? Are you reading to get a general idea about a topic? Do you want to have a deep understanding of what you read? When you know your purpose for reading, you can apply specific skills such as skim reading, scanning or reading in detail.

After previewing the article as described above, follow the steps for efficient reading.

• Read the first paragraph carefully to gain a general idea of what the article is about.
• Next, skim read the article (read very quickly without using a dictionary).
• Guess the meaning of words you do not know by gaining information from other words in the sentence that you do know.
• Read the conclusion carefully.

If you follow the above steps, you will find that you will be able to read more quickly and understand most of the article.

If you wish to gain a deeper level reading of the article, you could read the article again slowly and in more detail, taking time to look up words in your dictionary if you need to.

If you are looking for specific information, you do not need to read the whole article. You can scan the article to locate the key words for the topic or information you are interested in. You are scanning for information when you look up somebody's telephone number in the telephone book.

Monash libraries and most local libraries will keep copies of daily newspapers.

 

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Last updated: 02 April 2009 - Maintained by lsweb@lib.monash.edu.au - Accessibility information - Author Julia Ghazarian