News Alert!

I'm sitting here staring at the Wall Street Journal, and on the front page is an article that one of my CSW students could use in his essay. He's writing about the collapse of the American car industry, and the article suggests that auto parts suppliers have been spurred to innovate, while the car designers themselves have not.

This gave me an idea for a project in CALL. Using a variety of newspapers, for example, the WSJ, the Chicago Tribune, and a local paper, I'll choose an article from each paper for the students to read. Then, the students will be asked what they think the differences are between these papers. The students won't realize it, but they'll be identifying tone, voice, style, audience, the usual rhetorical suspects.

After that, the students will choose a section from the newspapers and then choose a topic appropriate for that section. Then, the students will write an article for that section.

We'll combine the articles into a class newsletter, and publish it from the class website.

Hmm....