Learning to read newspapers in efl class, or neologisms in english newspaper texts

Abstract

No doubt, reading newspapers in EFL class has become a must, for newspapers provide relevant information telling the reader all about what is happening in the world, and, in this way, deepening and broadening the outlook of students. Another feature of newspapers is that they include texts of different types and language styles not easily found in belles-lettres. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the fact that modern lingua-didactics pays much attention to the functioning of new words in texts of different types, including newspaper texts. However, the problem of teaching students to read newspapers containing new words (neologisms) is not sufficiently studied. This determined the purpose of this research. The authors were able to analyze the functioning of neologisms in English newspaper texts and pinpoint the frequency of their use, which resulted in compiling a glossary and developing a set of training and test exercises which were approbated in the experiment with the aim in view to help students deal with the large amount of vocabulary they confront, and learn to distinguish neologisms associated with a particular content area from general academic vocabulary. The findings of the research can serve as general recommendations for university faculty and can be used in EFL class.