Online News As Learning Resource in EFL Classrooms

Abstract

Newspaper has been acknowledged as one useful learning resource in EFL classrooms. In this digital era teachers as well as learners can access unlimited resources on the internet; one of the resources available for free and at all times is online news. However, nowadays some students are not really keen on reading news and reading it in English is even more challenging. For this reason this study aims to bridge this gap. This research tries to find out in what way reading news on the same topics in both the Indonesian and English versions benefits EFL learners in terms of content and vocabulary. There were 98 Indonesian freshmen from three Reading classes taking part in this study. They read both the Indonesian and English news on the same topics as their reading assignment during the semester. At the end of the semester an online survey was conducted to find out the benefits of the assignment. A focused group interview was conducted to gain more information on the subjects’ responses in the survey. The findings show that reading both the Indonesian and English news on the same topics enhance the subjects’ understanding of the content of the English news as well as help them better guess the meaning of unknown English words and increase their vocabulary knowledge.   Keywords: online news, learning resource, EFL classrooms