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111

BOOK NOTICES

Meet the Press. Reading Skills for 

Upper-Intermediate and More Advanced Students.

Janice Abbott. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981. Pp. 1-116.

English by Newspaper. How to Read and Understand

an English Language Newspaper.

Terry L. Fredickson and Paul F. Wedel. Rowley, MA:

Newbury House Publishers, Inc, 1984. Pp. iii 

+ 179.

Having two recent textbooks

with the same purpose for stu-

dents on the same level of reading

ability provides an opportunity to

evaluate each one far better than

had there been only one such

book available. Both textbooks

recognize the need to help non-

native students make the transi-

tion to the authentic print world

of the newspaper, a special genre

within which are several sub-

genres. The two books differ

primarily in organization and ap-

proach to teaching skills. While

they both aim to teach the same

general skills and to relate the

students’ preferences and inte-

rests, one teaches the special

nature of 

newspaper writing in

greater depth and with greater

relevance to student needs than

does the other. To facilitate this

discussion, the textbook by Ab-

bott will be referred to as 

&dquo;AB&dquo;

and the one by Frederickson and

Wedel as 

&dquo;FW&dquo;.

Both AB and FW give ample

recognition to the diversity of

style (genre) and topic to be

found in the newspaper. They

both differentiate between

straight news, features and com-

mentary. AB bases its organi-

zation upon this diversity by

devoting most of the book to

chapters representing sections of

a newspaper as they might appear

in order, i.e, &dquo;news in brief,&dquo;

&dquo;home news,&dquo; foreign news,

business news, commentary, tra-

vel, the arts, etc., and one chap-

ter on advertisments. Each chap-

ter contains authentic excerpts

and whole stories typical of those

to be found in that particular sec-

tion of the newspaper, together

with exercises for practising dif-

ferent skills. At the back of the

book there is a brief chapter

which explains skill strategies and

includes a chart that cross-refer-

ences each skill with its corres-

ponding exercises throughout the

previous chapters. The author ex-

plains that this format is to pro-

vide the teacher and/or students

with two alternative approaches

to using the book: 1) sections

may be focussed on as interest-

areas, in which case the students

flip to the back for orientation to

each skill in the exercises, or 2)

112

skills may be focussed on one by

one, in which case students flip

from the skill-chart in the back to

various sections to find exercises

for the particular skill they are

learning.

FW also devotes attention to

the newspaper’s diversity in the

second half of the book, as a kind

of culminating activity to skills

taught in the first half. The taxo-

nomy of FW’s interest-areas dif-

fers from AB’s in that it is based

on 

&dquo;high-frequency&dquo; 

news stories

such as politics, disasters, crime,

business news, etc. instead of on

sections of the newspaper. There

is great overlap in their tax-

onomies, of course, but AB

covers a broader 

range 

of special

genres which FW omits, namely:

travel, sports, advertisements,

letters-to-the-editor, television,

and even cartoons. Although AB

does present more genre variety,

it misses the opportunity to teach

in depth the distinctive qualities

of each genre, since the same

kinds of exercises appear in every

chapter regardless of genre. Only

in the chapters on Commentary,

Letters-to-the-Editor and Adver-

tising does AB inject questions of

critical evaluation of the writers’

opinion and of slantedness of ap-

peal.

In spite of less breadth of in-

terest areas, FW covers its topics

in greater depth than does AB,

highlighting typical vocabularly

in each area of interest. Other

than distinctive topical vocabu-

lary, however, there is nothing to

mark FW’s high-frequency stories

as special genres, since they are

mostly straight news. The real

strength of the book lies in the

first part devoted to teaching skills.

This is where FW does teach stu-

dents to discriminate the dif-

ferences between straight news

and the other genres 

of commen-

tary and feature writing. In these

chapters FW makes explicit how

the rhetorical structures differ

and what devices are used to

achieve different purposes.

The critical difference, then,

between the two books is their

approach to teaching skills. FW

integrates the explanation of

skills with the exercises in a much

more accessible format which

allows more thorough teaching of

the finer points. After each point

is exemplified and practised it can

be followed up by a further

point, again exemplified, and so

on until the skill has not only

been explained in depth, but con-

tinually reinforced and developed

in practice. By contrast, AB’s

skills explanations are lumped

together in one or two para-

graphs summarizing a number of

strategies and referring the stu-

dent to far-removed and scattered

exercises without any step-by-

step development. One can im-

agine students doing the exercises

in each chapter without bothering

to consult the explanations, since

the exercises are very familiar

reading-comprehension types en-

countered in other kinds of

reading textbooks. Headlines, for

example, are treated much as

titles to any passage would be.

113

Only one brief chapter at the

back of the book discusses head-

line characteristics, such as the

special use of tenses and ellipsis.

In FW, on the other hand, each

aspect of headline reading is ex-

emplified with exercises and four

different types of headlines are

presented. FW breaks the rest of

the story down into consecutive

parts, beginning with the lead.

This approach teaches the pyramid

structure of a straight-news story

by a pedagogy that is itself a

method of pyramiding reinforce-

ment. In contrast, AB mentions

pyramid structure incidentally

without dealing with it explicity

of news stories.

FW shows how the pyramid

structure of news stories presents

difficulties as well as advantages

for the non-native student. The

student is guided through gram-

matical difficulties arising from

the nature of &dquo;packed&dquo; lead sen-

tences and frequent inversions.

Problems of anaphoric reference

are addressed, especially in

&dquo;come-on&dquo; sentences in feature

stories that are calculated to

mystify even native speakers. AB

does not even acknowledge these

problems. From examining what

can be read from the lead, FW

goes more deeply into the next

layers of the pyramid story,

showing exactly what each para-

graph can add to the unfolding

picture, using previous know-

ledge to predict. FW emphasizes

that predictability of content and

vocabulary is one of the main ad-

vantages the non-native student

obtains from pyramid structure.

Prediction is perhaps the super-

ordinate skill of all. Instead of

simply asking the usual com-

prehension questions as AB does,

FW guides the student to for-

mulate questions and then test

them out on the rest of the story.

AB mentions the &dquo;second

chance&dquo; for comprehension in

the rest of the story, but does not

emphasize it with specific exer-

cises as FW does.

Not only is the approach in FW

more geared to the specific task

of reading a newspaper, but the

exercises are more relevant to the

reader than those in AB. For ex-

ample, almost every chapter in

AB includes an exercise matching

headlines with brief news clips. In

addition to the fact that matching

is not an actual task to be per-

formed in reading, it encourages

scanning many clips at a time for

details in an mechanical, super-

ficial 

way, 

without relevance to

any purpose of the reader. Com-

pare this to a beginning FW exer-

cise where the student scans a

single clip at a time to ascertain

what it is about and whether it is

interesting enough to read fur-

ther. This stimulates a very real

task one faces upon opening a

newspaper. In other comprehen-

sion exercises in AB, such as true-

false and open-ended questions,

one wonders what or whose pur-

pose is being served by scanning

many articles at once for often

trivial-seeming details. In FW, on

the other hand, questions of

detail pertaining to each story are

114

more clearly related to what a

student might be looking for in

answer to prediction questions or

related to practising a particular

skill. For example, in answering

&dquo;How many people died?&dquo; the

student practises unravelling a

complex sentence full of 

ap-

positives to find out that only one

person is deceased. Another

small, but telling point is that FW

includes the choice &dquo;the story

doesn’t say&dquo; in a few exercises in

order to focus on the reader’s

desire to know.

Comparing the way both

books handle the skill of infer-

encing unfamiliar word meanings

demonstrates their effective dif-

ference. AB suggests strategies of

looking for explanations before

or after the word, reading ahead

for other clues or occurences of

the word, analyzing its part of

speech function, and even analyz-

ing its morphology. The student

is then referred to multiple-choice

exercises which insure attention

to context. Compared to FW’s

strategies, AB’s exercises are not

nearly as realistic and inventive.

In FW’s first strategy, &dquo;When

not to use the dictionary,&dquo; the

student must decide what to do

about each underlined unfamiliar

word, choosing one of three al-

ternatives : 1) the story can be

understood without it; 2) one can

get a general idea of its meaning

from context; or 3) the exact

meaning is necessary-- either read

further or look it up as a last

resort. If the student decides to

guess the word, the next strategy

is to visualize the sentence in

which it appears. After illustrating

this with a series of quick ex-

amples, the student moves on to

looking for explanations, followed

by immediate exercises, and then

looking for synonyms, again

followed by exercises to suit that

particular strategy. Thus the stu-

dent becomes actively involved in

weaning himself from the dic-

tionary. Yet FW does provide a

glossary of high-frequency news-

paper vocabulary, defining

italicized words throughout the

book. Although AB does not

provide such a glossary, it does

include a list of specialized

headline vocabulary of about 50

entries with definitions and ex-

amples. FW features a similar

headline vocabulary list of over

80 entries, plus related exercises.

An important consideration in

reading newspaper articles is

whether students are prepared

with the necessary background

knowledge. By presenting such a

broad diversity of topics, neither

book can undertake to develop

the requisite background for any

one of them. Both books advise

the teacher to use discusions and

suggest creative activities to ex-

pand upon high-interest stories.

However, FW goes further by in-

cluding exercises to develop the

student’s ability to recognize and

make use of background infor-

mation and interpretation pro-

vided by the writer in the same or

subsequent stories. In addition,

FW reiterates the importance of

practising each skill on current

news stories, urging the student

115

to follow a particular story for

several days or more in order to

get the benefit of content and

vocabulary repetition, which also

increases the ability to predict.

Other features of the two

books are worth noting. Each

book offers something in the way

of reading critically that is worth-

while. In AB it is the critical look

at advertising. In FW the chapter

on questioning the reliability of a

story’s sources, i.e., spokes-

persons and reporters, is thought-

provoking. Both books examine

opinion and ask students to com-

pare their opinions to the writers’

in chapters on commentary. AB

provides an annotated list of the

newspapers and magazines which

are its sources, acknowledging in

the text the source of each article.

Such a list might be useful in

comparing articles on the same

event in two different news-

papers, knowing the political

leanings of each publication from

the annotations. AB does not

make use of this possibility,

however. Both textbooks also

emphasize the importance of

reading quickly and not worrying

about understanding everything

in almost every exercise. Al-

though strictly timed reading is

recommended strongly as a goal

only FW provides precise time

limits for its exercises. AB in-

cludes a list of abbreviations to

be found in classified adver-

tisements, a worthwhile adden-

dum to its chapter on advertising.

Both books include an answer

key to the exercises, which is use-

ful for independent student

work. Finally, of the two books,

FW’s layout using headings and

indentation to enumerate points

at a glance is much clearer and

easier to follow.

On the whole, both books can

be helpful guides to the news-

paper 

for non-native students,

but FW 

is better because it is

organized in an integrated, con-

secutive fashion which takes the

special nature of the newspaper

into account, and is clearer to

follow and easier to use than AB.

FW’s ommissions of topic or

genre can be rectified because the

authors provide teachers with a

model for approaching the

reading of any type of article in-

side or outside the newspaper.

Roxanne J. Fand,

University of Hawaii

at Manoa

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