How to Read News Headlines and Improve Your English 📰 Learn with JenniferESL

Hi everyone. It's Jennifer here with a special kind of lesson.

I plan to give you some tips and a short task to help you practice your English,

particularly your grammar.

Do you think someone will ever write about you in the news?

If they did, what would you want the article to be about?

Well, we might never make the headlines, but we can still enjoy reading them. In fact,

it's an interesting and useful form of practice.

Here are five forms of language practice you can try.

You can scan the headlines in English every day on a favorite website.

Even on your busiest day, you can find one or two minutes to read the titles of the top stories.

If there are unfamiliar words, note them and then look them up when you have the time.

If a particular headline interests you, email the article to yourself. Then read it later when you have more time.

News articles can be challenging to understand, but with the help of a learner's dictionary

or an online translation tool you, can get support.

I'll list some free resources in the video description.

Learn to make predictions.

Look at the headline.

Before you read the full story,

predict what some of the details will be.

You can say or write your predictions. As you read, you'll be focused on whether your predictions were right or wrong.

Learn to summarize what you read. It's very good practice to think about what you just read and

summarize the main points.

You can say or write a few sentences to capture the basic story or argument.

Use the headlines to practice sentence structure and grammar forms. How?

Take a headline and rewrite it as a full sentence.

To do that you have to understand the grammar used by journalists.

Articles and other determiners are usually omitted.

Determiners are little words before nouns like

some, his, her...

The simple present is used for present and past events

They do this to make the actions seem more dynamic. The wording is more exciting and it catches your interest.

Helping verbs are usually omitted.

Title punctuation is used. Patterns vary.

Some news sources use sentence punctuation in the headlines, but without a period.

But many sources still use title punctuation,

capitalizing the first and last words as well as keywords like nouns, verbs,

adjectives and adverbs.

Some sources capitalize all prepositions or no prepositions.

Other sources capitalize only longer prepositions.

If you ever have to title your work, just be consistent in your practice.

Could see all three of these variations in news publications.

Here are additional patterns you'll see in the headlines.

Infinitives are used to express future actions.

The verb be is often omitted,

leaving a prepositional phrase, an adjective, or a past participle.

When it comes to numbers, the media likes to use numerals or figures rather than words

because figures are easier to read.

You'll see variation with punctuation, especially with direct speech.

Sometimes single quotation marks are put around a quoted statement or a few words of direct speech.

So here's your practice task: visit a news website. I'll list some suggestions in the video description.

Scan the headlines, meaning the titles of the major stories.

Choose one headline, copy it for me, and then rewrite it

as a complete sentence, using standard grammar and punctuation.

Please choose appropriate topics for all ages as there are some young learners who will read these comments, okay?

Before we end, I'd like to review how we can use the word "headline."

As a singular noun, "headline" refers to the title of a news article.

It's what you see first above the full story.

The headline is usually in a larger font and is in boldfaced letters.

You could say, "the headline caught my attention."

As a plural noun, "headlines" refers to the top stories in the news.

You'll hear these phrases:

So if a story made the headlines. it got into the news.

I hope you found this useful, and I look forward to reading your sentences based on the latest headlines.

Please like this video if you enjoy studying English with me. I'll see you again soon.

As always, thanks for watching and happy studies!

Become a sponsor of English with Jennifer.

You'll get a special badge, bonus posts, on-screen credit, and a monthly live stream.

Click on the link or look in the video description for more information.

Note that sponsorships are not available in every country at this time.

I'd like to say a very special thank you to my current sponsors. Hopefully, more of you will join us for the next live stream.

Join me on my YouTube community tab for special posts each week.

If you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. That way you'll get notification of every new video I upload to YouTube.