This article provides ideas for using the newspaper articles as a basis for materials design, language learning exercises, project work, CALL exercises and conversation classes. Practical advice is given on how to obtain newspapers on CD-ROM in Europe and the U.S.A. 1. Most people are familiar with CDs or compact discs as discs on which music is stored. However, you can store any kind of digital information on a CD, and computers can read information from a CD in the same way they read floppy computer discs. What is more, the CD-ROM software will conduct searches and locate for you within seconds all the articles on any subject you specify, and then print them out onto paper.
Several books are available which provide an outline of British or American civilisation issues.
However, they are often too generalised and in insufficient depth for project work. The physical space involved in storing collections of back copies of newspapers is considerable, as is the difficulty in keeping them in order. Interesting articles get cut out and disappear. Furthermore, for institutions outside anglophone countries, it can prove too expensive to subscribe to a daily anglophone newspaper. Newspapers on CD-ROM provide an appropriate solution to the above problems at a reasonable cost.