Actually, the basic idea behind this lesson is not so new. It has been around since the early1980s, perhaps even earlier. In learning to read a second language, the concept goes, it is better to read several stories on the same topic instead of reading several stories on a variety of topics.

This process is known as "narrow reading". The theory is that by reading within the same topic, you can more easily understand the main ideas and the vocabulary used to describe them. Instead of struggling with totally new material, you will see many words and ideas repeated – a big help in understanding and remembering them.

The newspaper is the perfect place to find material for narrow reading. First, news stories often continue for many days. Each day you read, the story becomes more familiar and easier to understand.

Secondly, newspapers tend to focus on certain types of topics – politics, crime, the environment and the activities of famous and powerful people, just to name a few. By focusing on one topic at a time, you can quickly build up the language and the knowledge necessary to read stories within this topic – for the rest of your life!

Let’s try an example.

The rainy season is still with us. Almost every year at this time, the Bangkok Post has a lot of stories about floods. It won’t take very many of these stories for you to be able to read such stories with ease.

The hardest story will likely to be the first one you read. That is because much of the language may be unfamiliar to you. That is why it is worthwhile spending some time with the story, especially in learning the key vocabulary. You will certainly be rewarded for your efforts. In fact, you will often see much of the same vocabulary in the next story you read.

What do I mean by "key vocabulary"? I mean the words that are most closely related to the subject you are reading about. For example, an election story is likely to contain words like "candidate", "campaign" or "voter". Obviously, you need to know such words to read about elections. In the story below, you will find many of the words necessary for understanding flood stories.

With these words, you will have an excellent start towards reading and understanding almost any flood story you run across in the future.

Back in the "old days" when I began teaching, it would have taken me a long time to find the flood stories used in this lesson. First, I would have had to look through many issues of the Bangkok Post to find the stories I wanted. Then, I would have had to retype them on to stencils to make copies for my students.

How things have changed. In this case, it took me less than five minutes to select the stories on this page. And I didn’t have to do any typing whatsoever.

Better yet, you can do the same thing at your school or at your home providing you have access to the Internet. The Bangkok Post website contains all the locally-produced stories published in our newspaper for the past six years. And its all for free!

Here’s what you have to do:

This will bring you to the page where you can begin your search of the archives. Notice that there is a search box where you can enter keywords to help you find the kind of stories you are looking for.

Let’s suppose, you want to find more flood stories. What key words could you use. The word "flood" is an obvious choice, but there are some problems. First, flood has many forms, e.g., flood, floods, flooded, flooding, etc.

Fortunately, you can solve that problem by adding an asterisk (*) at the end of the word: flood*. The * is known as a "wildcard" and it tells the computer to find all the words beginning with "flood".

There is still a second problem, however. Flood can have several meanings, not all of which refer to the kind of flood you are looking for. A company can be "flooded" with customer complaints, for example.

We can solve this by adding one or more key words. In this case, "inundate" might be a good choice. Just remember to use "inundat*" to catch all the possible word forms: inundate, inundates, inundating, etc. Important: Put an "and" between the two key words. Then click on "go" to start your search.

This particular search found 277 stories containing forms of the words "flood" and "inundate". To make things easy for you, the list shows a short summary of each story. If a story looks like a good example, you can click at the top on the underlined title and that will bring you to the story itself.

How did I avoid having to retype the stories I found? If you know how to use a computer, you will know that I can copy a story from the Internet into the computer’s memory and paste it into a word processing program like Microsoft Word. Have a friend show you if you don’t know how to do this.

TEACHER'S NOTES This is a follow-up to the July 13 lesson on vocabulary building. The lesson focuses on building vocabulary directly by focusing on a single subject – in this case floods. Begin by spending some time helping your students understand the concept of narrow reading and why it can be useful in building their vocabularies. Make sure that they understand the idea of key vocabulary – words that are likely to be found in stories on a particular subject. The lesson itself will give them plenty of practice is identifying and understanding key words about floods. It also helps that this is a very timely subject, given the number of serious floods that have occurred recently in Thailand. Activity one Have the students read the first story and study the list of key words provided. Activity two Have your students read the additional stories. They should look for words repeated from the first list and then identify additional key words. This activity might best be done in small groups. Repeated words: impassable inundated evacuate flash floods depression relief Additional key words drain to cause water to flow out deploy to put in place ready to do a job security forces members of the police or the military runoff water that flows out of an area recede (of flood water) to go back stranded unable to leave or go somewhere else suspended temporarily stopped brace for to prepare for something bad torrents large amounts of fast-moving water or heavy rain torrential rain extremely heavy rain (torrents) which lasts for a long time wreak havoc to cause great damage and confusion low pressure wedge a system of low pressure which moves into an area swirling moving quickly in a twisting, circular manner marooned stranded; unable to move or leave an area mobilise to gather together and get ready for action respite a pause or rest from something difficult channel a passage for water to flow reinforce to strengthen discharge to let (water) out dyke a wall which keeps water out of an area rupturing breaking deluge a very large amount of rain or water reservoir a place which is used for storing water With this list and the rest of the words from the first story, your students should be able to read almost any flood story with ease. They will still encounter some new key words, but the number will be very manageable. Finding stories the modern way This section of the lesson is an explanation of how to use the free Bangkok Post archives for use in finding topics for narrow reading. Many of the teachers using this programme were able to try this process out during the seminars we held just before the programme began. It would be a very good idea for your students to try this procedure out as well. It can be an excellent out-of-class activity. Have students choose various topics and then think of key words that could be used in a search. Then have them try to find stories on these topics using the Bangkok Post archives. By dividing up the work, your class can build up a very large store of vocabulary items related to recurrent topics in the news. Recent issues Your students might also want to take a look at a second archive available from the Bangkok Post. That is the archive of recent issues which is also accessible from the home page. In fact, the link is right above "complete archives". Here students can look through the past two months of the Bangkok Post by day. This is very good for finding recent stories in the news. For example, you will find an excellent series of stories on the floods in the north by looking at Bangkok Post issues starting from August 12. Click here to look at the whole series of lessons. Go back to the top