Well, the dust has barely settled on the 2009 English Exam (more posts about that particular 3 hourexperience later) and we’re already thinking of next year.

This week we saw the brand-new, pre-release, freshly minted and entirely rewritten Issues Book, which we’ve been working on for a while. It’s great to see it ready to go for the year ahead.  Contact Cengage for purchasing details.

We hear a lot about the diversity of our press, especially in comparison with other countries such as China, but it wasn’t really in evidence in the sports pages in Melbourne this week. Maybe some good advice would be to ‘think of the most obvious headline, and then think again!’.

‘Dream team’ 28/7/2009

Jumping Jack Flash 27/7/2009

Right about now many students will be thinking about issues, and what issue they might respond to for AOS3. Some schools choose the issue for the whole year level, others have individual classes doing different issues while others allow students to choose.

Two issues in the media in the last week that have a lot of potential for language analysis and point of view writing are ‘whaling’ and ‘cycling in Melbourne’

Whaling is an ongoing issue, in the news a lot and it raises plenty of emotions and strong feelings.

A much more localised, and probably briefer, issue is the issue of cyclists and how they should be treated and how they should act on the road. Rod Moodie of the AGE write a piece last week called ‘It’s war on the roads and cars should not be the winners‘ (March 7th) and the paper also featured three letters on the same topic that day. That’s more than enough to get you started if you’re interested in that as an issue.

Photo: Warrick

If you’ve been discussing ISSUES in class lately, you might want to take a look at a cool site called Newseum which lets you look at the front page (in a small version!) over over 500 newspapers from around the world. A nice place to begin a discussion about newspaper layout, the relative importance of issues and how newspapers compare in the way they present information.

They say: Every morning, more than 500 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum via the Internet to be part of Today’s Front Pages.

When the Newseum opens in 2008 in downtown Washington, D.C., the Today’s Front Pages gallery will give visitors an up-close look at the day’s news on up to 80 newspaper front pages from every state, the District of Columbia and countries around the world.
The gallery — featuring a spectacular view of the U.S. Capitol — will provide the perfect setting for visitors contemplating the relationship between press and democracy.

Until then, the full selection of front pages is available on newseum.org each day by 9:30 a.m.

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