Hi there,

Following the visit of Nishani and her workshop about #Blacklivesmatter, I am reading more articles about the symbols in the videos of Beyonce and if this topic interested you, I advise you to read from the internet. There are many interesting stories like this one : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jessica-bolanos-/11-references-you-missed-in-beyonces-formation_b_9196612.html

When we talked about the demonstrations, Nishani mentioned that the Native Americans were as well arranging huge gatherings and you might check this reportage from the BBC:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37249617

Hi there,

I have had a look at a few blogs, and I am already enjoying the project. Some wrote very nice texts, some found interesting odd articles, but there are still many of you who didn´t start their blogs.
We will have a look at that tomorrow during the English lessons.

I found here a nice example of sensational news from a UK tabloid newspaper.
See how they present the news of Hillary Clinton being on a 2 days sick leave for pneumonia on their first page!

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/

and this is the first page of the Guardian

Extended reading

What is extended reading?

Extended reading is an approach to language teaching in which learners read a lot of material in the new language. They choose what they want to read without the supervision from their teacher.
The purpose is that the reader chooses his reading according to his/her own interest and enjoys his reading.

• The reading material has to be easy
• You need a wide variety of reading material in different topics
• you have to choose what you want to read
• you have to read as much as possible
• Silent /individual reading
• No grading related to the reading
• The teacher can orient and guide the students
• The teacher is a role model of a reader

Many good things happen when students read for pleasure. Researchers have seen that students become more confident readers, write better, improve their listening and speaking abilities and enrich their vocabulary. In addition they become more motivated to learn and study the new language.

Many teachers use extended reading in their class. A common thing is to use Graded Readers i.e. novels, either shortened or made easier for learners. We have some at the library, but not enough according to my taste.

As students of International English, you are already learners at an advanced level, and you are all used to read authentic material. You are therefore going to read authentic articles on these websites I have recommended, and for the ones who do not feel that comfortable with these to start with, they could use the two websites, the Times in plain English and the Easier version of the New Internationalist. The purpose of extended reading is to read a lot of texts we do not feel too challenging. I do not want you to check every single unknown word in your dictionary. You have to keep on with your reading and guess from the context. If there are too many difficult words, it means that the text is too difficult for you and that you should go back to one of these two simplified websites.

information taken from this book : Bamford, J. DayR. Richard (2004). Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hello and welcome on my Free Voluntary Web Surfing website.

We are going to run an interesting reading and writing project this semester. The purpose of the project is among others to increase your reading comprehension, general knowledge, critical thinking,  critical use of sources, your writing as well and the extend of your vocabulary. One of my main aim is also to give you the time and the opportunity to experience the pleasure of reading during class.

Each English block is going to start with 20 minutes of free voluntary web surfing from English speaking news website followed by 5-10 minutes where you have the opportunity to share your reading experience with your classmates and then followed by 10 minutes of free writing on your own blog.
Your reading can be about any type of news as long as it is in English and that it interests you. Your 10 minutes of free writing can be as well about any aspects of your reading experience. It can be about the content of the article(s), why you chose to read that specific article, how you did end up reading that specific article, ...

Once a week, during the study block, you are going to visit the website http://www.readtheory.org
where will read a text and answer reading comprehension questions. From my end, I will monitor your reading comprehension progress from this website and I will as well read and comment on your blogs.

This information will form the base and the material of my master thesis in Literacy Studies. The title of my thesis is going to be something like "Study of the Impact of Free Voluntary Web Surfing in a Upper Secondary EFL class in Norway".

Here is a list of webpages you can visit to chose to read from

BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

Online newspapers

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/magazine

Overview of the newspapers from the UK

http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/uk-newspaper-guide.cfm

Overview of the newspapers from the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States

Australian newspapers

http://www.newspapers.com.au

New Zealand

http://www.w3newspapers.com/new-zealand/

South Africa

http://mg.co.za

These two web pages offer simplified versions of their regular issues.

https://eewiki.newint.org/index.php/Main_Page

http://www.thetimesinplainenglish.com