Reading English News Articles by Constructing Tables

Abstract

This paper shows a way of helping readers to understand the contents of English passages by constructing tables. It is based on three recent business news articles used in the author’s 2018 Marketing and Management classes. The paper follows on from the author’s previous paper “Authentic Reading on Business News Articles” in Ohkagakuen University’s Journal of the School of Liberal Arts, Volume 8 (2016), but with an emphasis on the effectiveness of table making for a comprehensive perspective. Table activities are more productive for this than multiple choices or the understanding of detached sentences. The discussion of each is accompanied by a content table to be filled in through reasoning and logic, with a few additional questions. Tables, as understood here, are constructions that “show numerical values or textual information arranged in an orderly display of columns and rows” and “present a large amount of information efficiently” (American Psychological Association, 2010, 125). Constructing a table of the sort used to solve a logical problem can be an excellent way to obtain a comprehensive picture of information in an article. This paper also demonstrates how this can lead to a more integral understanding of an article through inferences about non-explicit information.departmental bulletin pape