What'sNews?Students' attraction to news and entertainmentmedia can fuel comprehension and critical thinking.

Renee Hobbs

We hear the cotnplainteverywhere:Teachers lamentthat their studentslack the requisite

knowledge, skills, or disposition toread lhe materials placed before them.Educators are frustrated by anincreasing number of students whocannot make sense of texts appropriatefor their grade level. Many studentsdon't even seem to care that theircomprehension is poor. Yet the abilityto read with understanding is essentialto thriving in the information age andleaming across a lifespan. How caneducators prepare students to meet tbischallenge?

One strategy is to broaden students'in-school reading to include analysis ofreal-world texts from various newsmedia. Analyzing news media is part ofa leaming approach known as medialiteracy, which helps students access,analyze, evaluate, and create messagesusing media in various forms (see "APrimer on Media Literacy" p. 61).Media literacy has been central to thecurriculum in the United Kingdomsince the 1980s. The move to a national

curriculum in England and Wales inthe late 1980s expanded opportunitiesfor older bigh school students toexplore media issues. By 2000, morethan 18,000 students in tbe UnitedKingdom were sitting for "A" levelexams in Media Studies, Film Studies,and Communication Studies, and5,000 students were being tested onmedia knowledge within the vocationaleducation curriculum. Since 1Q98,there has been a distinct media literacycomponent to the language artscurriculum for 14- to 16-year-oldstudents (Hart & Hicks, 2000).

In U.S. schools too, teachers recog-nize tele\'ision, movies, magazines,newspapers, and online multimedia asresources that can deepen readingcomprehension and critical thinking.Rather than viewing pnnted texts andelectronic media as competing witheach other, educators create synergybetween these two forms as a way tobring literacy skills to students enteringtbe 21st century.

Exploring news media broadensreading instruction by giving studentsaccess to culturally important domainsof knowledge and a way to pursue

intellectual and personal goals. As PaulFolkemer, a longtime media literacyadvocate and assistant superintendentof schools in Scarsdale, New York,commented.

News media offer a dynamic set ofmessages that help students see thechallenges, delights, controversies, newdiscoveries, and sheer wonder ol theeveryday world.

Media and Language ArtsAfter years of \ieviang news media andpopular culture as the enemies ofliteracy teachers at Concord HighSchool in New Hampshire havedecided to instead use students' interestin media to strengthen reading compre-hension and skills in literary analysisand writing. In 1998. the school boardadded a yearlong required course in

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Exploring news media broadens readinginstruction by giving students access toculturally important domains of knowledge.

communications/media for l l ih gradestudents to its English/Language Artscurriculum. Concord was one of thefirst school districts in the United Statesto include media literacy extensively inits secondary-level language artscurriculum.

Concord English teacher JoanneMcGlynn, for example, regularly guidesher English 11 class in criticallyanalyzing news articles. Beyond focusingon facts and vocabulary, students alsoreflect on the photo and headline thataccompany the stor>': What feelings doesthe photo evoke? Hovv- does the visualcomposition and framing of the imagecommunicate a point of \iew? Whatdoes the editors choice of headlinecommunicate? McGlynn helps studentsanalyze who is telling the story andidentify signs of bias.

Eor example, after reading the firsttwo paragraphs of an article, studentspredict what information or opinionsthe writer will emphasize in the para-graphs to follow, and what kmds ofpeople will be quoted. They imaginethe situations depicted in the article,sometimes drawmg a timeline to visu-alize the sequence of events. Livelydiscussion ensues as students voicetheir opinions and provide additionalinfonnation. McGlynn often concludesthe lesson by asking students togenerate a question that the newsarticle did not address and urging themto explore other news outlets to leammore about the story

English 11 students at Concord Highanalyze not only the language andimages of traditional literary forms likenovels and short stories but also those

of tele\'ision shows, print and televisionjournalism, movies, advertising, arti-facts of popular culture, politicalcommunications. Web sites, online chatrooms, and other nontraditional texts.Students critically examine news mediaby comparing coverage of a news eventacross multiple print and electronicsources. They explore how persuasionand propaganda operate. They studyrhetorical techniques, analyzing choiceof words and imagery and the sequencein which information is presented.Teachers prompt students to look atwhose perspectives mainstream newsstories most emphasize—and whosethey most ignore.

Active, Relevant ReadingAll Enghsh 11 teachers at Concord usefive framing questions to unify their

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curriculum and help students activelyinterpret and analyze messages fromboth news media and works of litera-ture. These questions invite readers toconsider concepts of authorship,purpose, audience, rhetorical tech-niques, and point of view:

• Who is sending this message, andwhat is the author's purpose?

• What techniques attract and holdattention?

• What points of view are repre-sented in this message?

• How might different people inter-pret this message differently?

• What is omitted from this message?To understand the concept of hias

more deeply, last spring students inEnglish 11 created a list of all thestories broadcast in one evening onNew Hampshire's only local channel,WMUR-Channel 9. After writingsummaries of the news stories, studentsreplayed the video and looked at thechoices that broadcasters had made inthe news script. They documentedemotional language, vivid phrases.

metaphors, and other attention-gettingwords, discussing which news storiesused the most emotionally intenselanguage and why Students countedthe number of minutes devoted to hardnews, international news, local news,crime stories, and features. They weresurprised by how much time the broad-cast devoted to "happy talk" betweenon-air news personalities.

Concords English teachers rarelyhear students ask, "Why are weleaming this?" because students recog-nize that news coverage of events andissues matters to the quality of life intheir community. They enjoy askingcritical questions about the newsmedia. "We learned that reading is anactive process," one 11th grade studenttold me recently when 1 visited theschool:

Reading and understanding the news,analyzing haw people insert their pointof view in messages, selecting andfinding relevant information—theseare skills that I will be using the restof my life.

Results: Sharper SkillsDuring the 1998-1999 school year, mycolleague Richard Frost and I examinedhow incorporating media literacy intothe English curriculum affected Concordstudents' reading comprehension andwriting skills. We compared all 293 11thgrade students at Concord High Schoolwith a demographically matched sampleof 89 11th graders from a high schoolwhere students had received no instruc-tion in critically analyzing media. Wemeasured reading comprehension byhaving students compose a writtensummary of an article from Time maga-zine, awarding points for correctlyincluding main ideas. We measuredwriting skills by examining the quantityof writing that students produced andthe number of spelling and grammarerrors they made, and awarded eachstudent a score between 1 and 5 on thebasis of a holistic assessment of clarityand coherence. We also measuredstudents' viewing skills by having themsummarize and respond to questionsabout a TV tiews segment on the impactof a hurricane. We examined listeningskills by having students listen to a newscommentary prepared by NationalPublic Radio. Eor all of" these, we askedstudents to summarize main ideas andto identify the author's purpose, targetaudience, rhetorical techniques, andpoint of view.

Compared with the control group,the Concord students showed signifi-cant gains in reading and viewingcomprehension, writing skills, and theability to pinpoint purpose, point ofview, and rhetorical techniques. Themean reading comprehension score forthe Concord students was 2.92,compared v^th the control group's meanof 2,01, The mean score for viewingcomprehension was 2,85 for Coiicordstudents, compared with 2,25 for thecontrol group.

In a 2003 study. Frost and 1 foundthat Concord students' reading andwriting skills were stronger than those

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of students who had been exposed to atraditional literature-based Englishcurriculum without news literacy{Hobbs & Frost. 2003).

Mu Iti modality and MotivationWhy is media literacy effective inpromoting reading comprehension?First, strong readers are self-motivatedand read actively, monitoring theircomprehension by questioning,reviewing, and rereading. Teachers canfoster this active stance through the useof multimedia activities that encouragereflection and questioning. In addition,

A Primer onMedia Literacy

Media literacy is an expandedconceptualization of literacy thatencompasses the ability to access,analyze, evaluate, and createmessages In a wide variety of forms.

• Access skills- The ability to decodeand comprehend messages as wellas the knowledge of how to find andselect messages to meet specificneeds.

• Analysis skills. The ability to recog-nize the author's purpose, point ofview, and strategy for appealing to atarget audience using appropriateconventions, genres, and forms.Analysis skills also include the abilityto recognize the political, economic,historical, and social contexts inwhich messages circulate.

• Evaluation skills. The ability tojudge a message's quality, authen-ticity, accuracy, and relevance. Eval-uation skills rely on the ability todetermine a message's value andworth in relation to other messagesfrom different sources.

• Creation skills. The ability to brain-storm ideas and compose messagesfor such purposes as informing,persuading, and entertaining, using awide range of media tools.

Students documented emotional language,metaphors, and other attention-gettingwords, discussing which news stories usedthe most emotionally intense language.

multimodality is a key feature of readingin the 21st century. Many texts—suchas Web sites, educational multimedia,newspapers and magazines, and broad-cast documentaries—routinely combineverbal, visual, and auditory forms ofexpression. Such messages mix bothmedia and genres.

Finally, teachers have long knownthat students are highly motivated andengaged by visual and electronic texts-Most students perceive newspapers,magazines, TV, movies, and Web sites asrelevant to their lives. When teachersincorporate news and entertainmentmedia skillfully into reading instatction,students see that understanding thesetexts matters—that reading is not just ahoop to jump through en route to highschool graduation.

An increasing number of commercialprint and electronic news media areavailable to integrate into instruction,including Tintejor Kids, Channel OneNews, Weekly Reader, CNN Student News,Tern People, and the Scholastic/New YorkTimes magazine UpFront These mediaare designed to motivate readers tomake the effort required for compre-hension. Last fall, a new television showcalled Kids News, hosted by a diverseteam of young people reporting from aprofessional news set, premiered on 150stations nationwide. Teachers candownload the Kids News scripts to usein their classrooms. Skillful media useand script-reading activities can alsosupport the acquisition of Englishlanguage skills, particularly amongsecond-language learners (Warschauer& Meskiil, 2000).

Media literacy is a key asset in ademocracy as well as a bridge toreading comprehension. J. LynnMcBrien (2005) asserts that "studentsin a democracy must learn how andwhy news stories are produced in orderto think consciously and criticallyabout infonnation" {p. 31). As educa-tors seek fresh ways to help adolescentreaders strengthen their skills, medialiteracy should continue to be includedin the package. 10

ReferencesHart, A., & Hicks, A. (2002). Teaching media

in the English curriculum. Stoke-on-Trent,UK: Trentham Books.

Hobbs, R., & Frost, R. (2003). The acquisi-tion of mcdia-liieracy skills. ReadingResearch Quarterly, 38(3), 330-355-

McBrien, J. L. (2003). Uninformed tn theinformation age: Why media necessitatecritical thinking education. In G. Schwarz& P. U. Brown (Eds.), Media literacy:Transforming curriculum and teaching (pp.18-34). 104th Yearbook of the NationalSociety for the Study of Education.

Warschauer, M., & Meskiil, C. (2000).Technolog}' and second languageteaching and learning, lnj, Rosentha!(Ed.), Hundhook of undergraduate secondlanguage education. Mahwah, NJ: Eribaum.

Author's note: You can find a listing ofstates' standards that include elements ofmedia literacy at hitp://medialiLmed.sc.edu/statelii.htm. To join the Alliance for aMedia Literate Amenca, the national organi-zation for media literacy, go to http://amlainfo•org.

Renee Hobbs is Associate Professor ofCommunication at Temple University,320Annenberg Hall, Philadelphia, PA19122; 215-204-4291; renee.hobbs@temple.edu.

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