If you’re looking to improve your English so you can study at a top Canadian university, it’s smart to read as much written English as you can get your hands on! One excellent source of reading material for ESL students is the news. Newspapers, advertisements, news bulletins, and more can be both interesting and informative for students like you. Here’s why.

Reading the News Improves Your Conversational English Skills

In Canada, newspapers are produced to provide everyday people with information about current events. The purpose of newspapers is to tell stories in ways that are easy for the average Canadian English-speaker to digest. That means the news is written in a style similar to the language you would hear spoken on the street by average Canadians.

By reading local news, you get instant access to the kind of vocabulary today’s English speakers use most often in conversation—making it a handy way to get comfortable with your second language while at ESL school.

Tip: Try reading news articles out loud with a pen in hand. Unlike textbooks, newspapers are disposable, so you can feel free to mark them up with notes and highlights. Circle new words, underline important sentences, and make note of which phrases you’d like to try using yourself!

Students in English Courses for Academic Purposes Read the News to Improve their Grammar

If you’re interested in taking English courses for academic purposes, you know that English universities expect a certain level of English proficiency among their students. You can get ready to become one of these strong ESL students with the right training program and the habit of reading the news.

Newspaper articles tend to use crisp, clear writing with short, declarative sentences—sentences that use a subject-verb-object structure pattern. Usually news article headlines follow this rule. It helps newspapers achieve the kind of clear and easy-to-read writing that professors expect in English college and university programs.

You can even access the news in different levels of difficulty, through resources like BBC’s Learning English page, The New York Times’ Learning Network page, and NewsInLevels.com. All mainstream news media sites and newspapers are carefully edited, so reading them at any level of difficulty will show you clear examples of how English grammar and punctuation should be used.

Students in English Courses for Carleton University Read the News to Learn New Vocabulary

Perhaps the most exciting benefit of reading the news as an English-learner is the range of topics and vocabulary it presents. By reading about current events, you’ll learn about topics like culture, events, and politics that are exciting to talk about with friends and classmates.

If you’re taking English courses for Carleton University, reading the news can help you learn new vocabulary. In fact, at CultureWorks, we even have an elective called ‘The Daily Boomalang,’ where students read and discuss current events. Reading the news can also help you boost program-specific vocabulary too. If you’d like to learn more business vocabulary, for example, you could practice reading the business section of the newspaper.

Are you interested in taking ESL for Carleton University?

Visit CultureWorks to learn more about getting started.