Newsmap-France: Lisons les Manchettes!
This material was originally developed through
Merlot as part of its collaboration with the SERC Pedagogic Service.
Summary
In this Interactive Lecture Demonstration, students of intermediate-level French will attempt to predict the content of articles on the Health Science pages of French newspapers by reading headlines on the Newsmap website. They then read the full-length articles and reflect on their actual content.
According to the author of Newsmap: "Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way, users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article. Newsmap also allows users to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business."
The present activity allows students to hypothesize about content by first reading headlines and then predicting the content of the accompanying articles.
CollapseLearning Goals
- Students will develop their reading comprehension through interaction with authentic French-language print news sources.
- Students will develop their ability to hypothesize in French.
- Students will increase their awareness of the health issues covered in French print news sources.
- Students will have the opportunity to compare French health concerns with those of their own countries.
Context for Use
Description and Teaching Materials
Teaching Notes and Tips
- Newsmap is a website that is very visually distinctive, as the sections are color-coded according to topic (Health articles are purple). The user can choose the languages of various countries from the horizontal navigation bar above and can sort the headlines for health only by clicking purple on the horizontal navigation bar below. The font size of the headlines are larger depending on the number of publications that cover a particular story. This feature gives the students an idea of how important a given story is considered in a given country.
- As a classroom exercise, the instructor can choose a set of headlines and ask the students to predict the kind of vocabulary, facts and language they'd expect to see in the actual article. After several responses, the instructor can click on the actual article and check for accuracy.
- As a homework exercise, the students can be asked to read headlines and write their predictions about the contents of the article in a discussion board. After posting the predictions, students could go back and reflect on their own accuracy in a second post. (Tip: If given for homework, the professor should assign the various headlines to small groups of students, so that a variety of articles would be covered.) As a follow-up exercise in the next class, students could compare their pre-conceived ideas to reality. They could also ask linguistic questions about the headlines and the content of the articles.
Assessment
If the homework assignment in the discussion board is used, students can be granted points based on the quality of their posts and the re-use of target language vocabulary.