The main purpose of Post Tips is to provide teachers with a complete lesson that they can use with their classes. But we have also tried to design it in such as way that anyone can benefit. The format will vary somewhat from week to week so we can introduce teachers and students to a range of reading techniques, but the general design so remain relatively constant. For example, there will always be an introduction to make the purpose of the lesson clear. There will generally be some kind of pre-reading activity, followed by one or more texts that have recently appeared in the Bangkok Post. The lesson will generally end with a follow-up activity and, of course, some notes to the teacher. You will notice that all these features appear in today’s column.

Story-telling, newspaper style

This is especially true of the news sections of the paper and that is where we will focus in this lesson. I am going to begin, however, by telling you a story in a different style. It is a style that is very familiar to all of us. I am simply going to tell the events in the story in the order in which they happened, i.e., what happened first, what happened second, etc. This is known as telling a story in chronological order. For more background on how news stories are written, turn to The news story style.

Here is the story:

1. Apparently a teacher at a Thai agricultural college placed an order with a shopkeeper for some coral.
2. The shopkeeper, a 60-year-old Chinese lady, hired some villagers to collect the coral at Koh Mook in Trang’s Chao Mai national park for 60 baht a sack.
3. The sacks were stored at the shopkeeper’s shop.
4. One day, the nephew of local villager, Yahead Hawa, saw the sacks being loaded onto a truck by a park employee.
5. He told Mr Yahead about what he had seen.
6. Mr Yahead suspected something unusual was occurring and he rushed to the scene, but the truck had already left.
7. He and some other villages decided to conduct an investigation.
8. A week later, they found the truck driver who told them that the sacks contained coral and were delivered to the teacher at the agricultural college.
9. Mr Yahead told the village headman and a senior park official about the theft of the coral, but they ignored the complaint and took no action.
10. The villagers then decided to take the law into their own hands.
11. Mr Yahead confronted the shopkeeper and threatened to notify the authorities to take legal action against her unless she returned the coral.
12. She agreed to do so.
13. When the villagers received the coral, they dumped it back into the sea.
14. Later, officials—including some of those who earlier ignored the villagers’ complaint—decided to take legal action against the shopkeeper after all.
15. It is likely, however, that she will only face a minor penality if she is found to have broken the law.

A better way

• Today, Revadee wants to quickly find a story about yesterday’s big fire in her neighbourhood.
• Kovit wants to get a quick idea of the main stories in today’s paper before hurrying off to work.
• Kanda is not looking for any story in particular, but she is very interested in stories which deal with the saving of Thailand’s natural environment.

Locals dump coral back into the sea Villagers take law into their own hands Chakrit Ridmontri Trang A group of villagers living close to Chao Mai national park took the law into their own hands, seizing 60 sackfuls of coral skeleton collected from the park after their complaints to the authorities went unheeded. The villagers confronted a shopkeeper on Chao Mai beach who was behind the illegal collection and urged her to turn over the corals to them. They later dumped the corals back into the sea. Yahead Hawa, a Chao Mai villager, said he smelt something fishy after his nephew told him that heavy sacks stored at a shop belonging to a 60-year-old Chinese lady were being loaded onto a truck by a park employee. He rushed to the scene but the truck was gone, he said. He and some villagers decided to launch their own investigation. After a week they found the truck driver who told them that the sacks contained coral. The shopkeeper was said to have hired villagers to collect the coral at Koh Mook under the park’s jurisdiction at 60 baht a sack. They were delivered to a teacher at an agricultural collage, 60 kilometres away, who placed the order. “I notified the village headman and a senior park official about the trafficking, but they refused to take action, saying coral fragments were not important,” Mr Yahead said. He decided to confront the shopkeeper, telling her to return the corals or he would notify the authorities to take legal action against her. The woman complied. “I really didn’t want to threaten her with legal action because I don’t want to have a conflict with her. I would rather have her join our conservation activities. She would be very helpful because her shop is located on the beach where she could ask tourists to refrain from littering the beach,” said Mr Yahead, whom other villagers have praised for his conservation-mindedness. But Mr Yahead’s hope to persuade the shopkeeper to help with his conservation efforts appeared to have been dashed after officials, some of whom ignored the villagers’ earlier complaints about the illegal activity, decided to take legal action against her. “As law enforcers, we have to take legal action against her. The police will investigate whether she really violated the law,” said Kantang district officer Winai Kuruwannaphat. Park chief Apai Yongsatar said one of his subordinates would lodge a complaint with Kantang police. “The shopkeeper would face a minor penalty because she might not have intended to break the law, but the mastermind should be further investigated,” he said. May 6, 1997

Understanding the news style of writing

Where is the information? Go back to the beginning of this lesson and look at the story as I wrote it in chronological order. Go through this story point by point. AS you look at each point, go to the news story and find out exactly where it was covered, i.e., in the main headline (MH), in the secondary headline (SH), paragraph 3 (P3), etc. You should notice that some of the points were covered more than once in the news story. This is important.

Several have been done for you:

Point 1 (“Apparently a teacher …”) P5

2. P3, P5
3. ....
4. ....
5. ....
6. ....
7. ....
8. ....
9. ....
10. ...
11. ....
12. ....
13. MH, P2
14. ....
15. ....

This brings us to a very important observation about the style of writting a news story: the main points of the story (the news) are introduced right at the beginning of the story. This way a reader like Revadee knows immediately just from reading the headline that this is not the story she is looking for. It also satisfies a reader like Kovit who just wants the main facts, not the details.

Look again at the points that were included at the top of the story. Notice that each of them was also covered at least once more later in the story. This leads us to a second observation about the news style: the main points of the story are introduced at the beginning and are then repeated in more detail later in the story.

This is for readers like Kanda who have a strong interest in the story’s subject and want to learn as much about it as possible. But it also helps readers like you who are learning to read news stories because it means that you get at least two and sometime three chances to understand the key ideas of the story.

It also means that you can often read a story without using your dictionary because you can guess the meanings of unfamiliar words. In today’s story, for example, you might not have known the word unheeded. But this idea appears twice again in the story in other, easier-to-understand terms (refused to take action and ignored).

Teacher’s note
I thought it would be a good idea to begin with a look at how we write our news stories. The object of this lesson is to help students discover the basic principles of news writing by themselves, first by looking at the events in a story as they actually happened—in chronological order—and then to see how the news writer structured them to highlight the most newsworthy elements.

The exercise is a key part of the lesson, because it guides the students through a step-by-step analysis of how the news writer ordered the events in the story. Teachers should then help the students understand why the story was written this way and how they can take advantage of this style to understand the story without extensive use of their dictionaries. All these points are covered in the commentary accompanying the story.

•This lesson was prepared by Acharn Terry Fredrickson, BA Stanford, MA (TESL) University of Minnesota, Manager of the Educational Services Department at the Bangkok Post and general editor of this programme.