Newspaper Article Jigsaw Reading Communication & Social Skills
At a Glance Students will: ü read and paraphrase parts of an article in discussion ülike putting together the pieces of a puzzle, students will see how the parts create the whole ü groups decide what the entire article is about		Purpose: to practise reading comprehension and group discussion skills Materials: a newspaper article, scissors, paste/glue/tape, prepared handouts with enough space to paste on sections of the article (see Fig. 1), and a complete copy of the article Preparation: see preparation procedure below Time: 35-60 minutes, depending on student level and the difficulty of the article
Teacher’s Notes	Procedure See Newspaper Article Jigsaw Procedure for teaching procedure Preparation Select a newspaper article to suit your teaching purpose and student level. Decide how many sections into which you will divide all or part of it. (I recommend three, and no more than 4 sections, or the second group activity (see Procedure below) becomes time consuming.) If possible, enlarge it on a photocopying machine to make it easier for students to read and for you to cut and paste. Generally you will want to omit the first paragraph of an average article because it contains all the key information. Also omit any other sections which give away too much information. The goal is to select sections that 1) have just enough information to arouse the student’s interest in the rest of the story, 2) contain some information that overlaps with other sections but also 3) contain important information not found in other sections. Dividing the article up according to these criteria presents information in a way that forces students to develop and share hypotheses and to depend on others for information. Thus, the task of reading becomes an interactive problem-solving activity. Next, prepare a handout sheet with instructions for doing the activity (see Figure 1). The sheet should have enough blank space for the section of the article to be attached. Label each sheet differently as a way of making sure students in the first group activity (see Procedure) have the same handout. I recommend using colors (e.g. blue, red and green) as labels instead of numbers or letters. (When numbers (1, 2 and 3) or letters (A, B and C) are used, students often assume that they indicate the order in which the sections appear in the original article.) Try to keep the handout as general as possible so you can use it for a variety of articles, and keep master copies, sans article, for future use.

Reading Newspaper Article Jigsaw Communication & Social Skills
Teacher’s Notes	Lesson Extension Newspaper articles have long been a staple item in both reading and conversation classes because they are generally short, predictable in style, timely in content, and easy to find and use. However, the traditional method of having students read silently, answer comprehension questions, and then discuss an article can become boring to both students and teachers. An alternative to this traditional approach is turning articles into jigsaw activities, in which any one student only has a portion of the information needed to complete a task. The advantage of jigsaw activities is that students must depend on each other for their information, so they must interact to accomplish a given task. The technique described below for making jigsaw activities from newspaper articles structures activities so that students read the text, hear the text, master new vocabulary, paraphrase, and interact at all stages of the activity (not at just the discussion stage, as in the traditional approach). Pre-intermediate to advanced students seem to prefer using jigsaw newspaper articles to the traditional approach. Adapted from an article originally published in The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. II, No. 2, February 1996. http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Dycus-Jigsaw.html Adapted with permission. Follow-up / Transfer Activities: The general procedure described below can be used with other types of texts as well as with newspaper articles. The description below is for a discussion class, but it can also be used with introductory sections of chapters in books as a warm-up activity for long texts.	Additional Resources · For an informative discussion of the making and using of jigsaw activities, see the chapter devoted to it in C. Kessler’s (1992) Cooperative Language Learning: A Teacher's Resource Book, published by Prentice Hall Regents. · See Communication and Social Skills for conversation and discussion skills lessons · Review paraphrasing