How to Use a Ten-Minute-English News Activity to Enhance Students' Reading Skills

Abstract

Reading skills are very important to language learners because reading skills provide them with lots of resources to also develop listening, speaking and writing skills. However, some students refuse to spend their time practising reading. This paper aims to report on a study showing how a Ten-Minute-English News activity was employed to enhance students' reading skills and attitudes towards the activity and materials designed for the activity by making use of electronic English newspapers and dictionaries. The subjects of this study were 40 students at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. The activity and the reading materials were employed during a fifteen-week semester in every class for 10 minutes before the teacher started teaching her normal English class. The scores of the first and last activities, in which the same news material was used, were employed to investigate how the students' reading skills had
improved. A questionnaire was also used to examine the students' attitudes towards the activity and the materials. The findings show that the students' reading skills had improved, proving that the Ten-Minute-English News activity had been very useful.