Teaching feature stories

Feature writers have the time and space to develop a topic in more depth than news writers do. And their subjects are usually much less urgent—they could normally be delayed a day or week without serious difficulty. In fact, many feature subjects (travel to a foreign land, a conversation with a famous person, etc.) are not really “news” at all. And if they concern serious subjects, they are usually of a background nature rather than a report of breaking news.
This leads to a very different style of writing from news writing. Feature stories, like those found in the Outlook section of the Bangkok Post on weekdays and Friday’s Real Time Magazine, tend to have a more traditional organisation than those found in the news section. They usually have a multi-paragraph introduction, a body containing two or more sections and a conclusion. But feature writers have considerable freedom of expression and their stories are far more varied in style than news stories. While news stories tend to maintain a consistent level of difficulty, feature stories can exhibit a huge range in difficulty and sophistication.

Students are often attracted to features because of their entertaining subject matter and the colourful pictures that accompany them. But many students are quickly frustrated when the stories themselves seem far more difficult than news stories. In some cases, their perceptions are correct, but in many others it is more a case of inexperience. The story’s difficulty may be confined to the introduction where the writer attempts to attract readers with clever techniques that may go over the head of non-native speakers. Or, inexperienced readers may not realise that a long story may actually be organised into a series of relatively easy-to-read shorter sections. And they may fail to take advantage of the many aids which accompany a story (blurbs, picture captions, headings) and provide clues to its main focus. All are fruitful areas for teacher intervention.

See Reading feature stories for more information.
See our Feature focus for the most recent lesson based on a feature story.
For other lessons on a variety of features click here.

Introducing feature stories
1. Compare one or more feature stories with a news story. Help your students see how much faster you catch the main ideas in the news story. They should see that the main idea in a feature story may be delayed for several paragraphs as the writer tries to attract the reader's attention. And note also how the feature story generally becomes much easier to read once the writer begins developing the main topic.
It is also useful to consider the subject matter of your feature story. Is the subject “news”? Is it necessary to publish the story today or could it be delayed? Could the news story be delayed?

2. We try to point out that feature writers spend a great deal of time and effort collecting and organising their information. Many feature writers work on a freelance basis and they must be interesting to sell their stories. Have your students skim and scan feature stories to determine their organisations and plan their reading strategies.

3. It may be necessary to give special help with introductions. If possible, try techniques which help students “discover” the meaning by themselves, but at times it may be necessary to explain them directly.

4. Make sure students know how to take advantage of layout aids such as blurbs (key sentences extracted from the story and set in large type), pictures and their captions, and any headings the story may contain. This should be an important part of any exercises aimed at finding a story's organisation.

Activities
1. The basic facts One way to help students see a feature writer’s technique is to reduce the story to a list of basic facts. Then students can consider how to make this into a saleable story. How would they organise the information? Where would their focus be? Would they use any special techniques to generate interest? For example, below is a list of facts from a 1995 story in the Real Time Magazine about the Karen people living in the border area between Burma and Thailand. Consider how the writer might have used this information to tell a compelling story.

The source (beginning) of the Salween River is in the Tibetan Himalayas.

It flows 3,151 kilometres through China and Burma to the sea.

The Chinese call the river Nujiang. The Tai of northern Burma call it Nam Khong and the Burmese call it Talwin.

For 120 kilometres it forms the boundary between Burma and Mae Hong Son province in Thailand.

There it joins the Moei River.

This border area is the home of the Karen.

The Karen are one of many ethnic minority groups in Burma.

They have had a long and troubled history since they were driven out of Mongolia 2,000 years ago.

The Karen have been fighting the Burmese for independence since 1948.

The Karen have recently split into two groups who are fighting each other.

In the actual story, the writer’s technique is obvious from the first few paragraphs:

“I am one of the millions of drops of water that combine to form the Salween River. We have been created by processes of natural change. I myself originated with the melting of ice high in the Tibetan Himalayas, and there are many others like me. As we flow south, we are joined by other journeyers who arrive from forest streams. Raindrops that fell on densely forested mountains eventually find their way into the Salween, swelling it to ever-greater size.

As we travel the 3,151 kilometres from our source to the end of our journey, we descend from some of the world's highest mountain peaks to sea level. During the trip we pass through lands that are home to many kinds of people. The Chinese call us the “Nujiang”; farther south we are the “Nam Khong” to the Tai of northern Burma. As we cross Burma, we become the “Talwin”.

After we have travelled great distances, we reach a 120-kilometre stretch where our waters form the boundary between Burma and Mae Hong Son Province in Thailand. Here, the Thais call us the “Salween”, and it is during this interval that we are joined by the Moei River, which originates in Phob Phra Sub-district of Mae Sod in Thailand. Then, after continuing on to Sob Moei District in Mae Hong Son, we cross back into Burma and continue on to the sea.

Travelling the distance along the Thai border, an area of perpetual tension and violence where peace is unknown, I feel a sense of agitation. How would it be possible not to feel it? Here the Salween, together with the Moei, are the “River of Life” for a small and desperately embattled group of combatants, the Karens...”

At this point the writer has reached his main subject—the plight of the Karens—but he continues his literary technique throughout. He is a drop of water in the Salween and he describes what he sees throughout his journey. It is not a pleasant sight.
One advantage of the activity we have suggested above is that the students become genuinely interested in finding out how the writer actually wrote the story. And since they know the story’s main facts and ideas before they begin, the story becomes relatively easy to read.

2. Putting the parts together A variation on the popular strip story technique can be very effective in helping students understand the importance of finding a feature story’s organisation. It can also be used to help them cope with a particularly long story. In this technique, the teacher writes the first sentence of each paragraph of the story on cards, mixes them up, and the students try to arrange them into the order used by the writer.

We use this technique with topics that the students are already familiar with. A good example was the activity we designed for a Sunday Magazine story on the many uses of the coconut tree. Thai students have a great deal of knowledge about coconuts and it is easy to get them to outline a possible story. When they receive their sets of cards, they can easily divide them into different categories (uses of the leaves, the wood, etc.). From then on they use the various organisational clues found in the topic sentences to put the story into a possible order. They then are given the actual story to see the writer’s organisational scheme. We sometimes suggest this technique for long, complicated stories as well, but instead of using topic sentences, we provide the story’s basic facts and details.

3. Mapping the story structure This can be particularly useful for a long complicated story. We sometimes do this as a series of connected boxes, partially filled by us and partially filled by the students. For more difficult stories we may do a complete map ourselves, often in picture form to create interest.

4. Taking advantage of the story structure Longer features generally have several parts. This makes them ideal for group exercises. Different groups can focus on different parts of the story. Later, students can be regrouped so that each member of the new group has different information from the story—an information gap activity. In some cases, more animated activities are possible. Recently, for example, we used a restaurant review of a provincial restaurant for three distinct activities. One group used the directions given in the review to make a rough map and then orally described how to get to the restaurant from Bangkok. Another used information from the review to demonstrate how to prepare the main dish served at the restaurant. A third group wrote a short play to illustrate how fundamental economic changes in the area drove the restaurant from the river to its present site on the river bank.

5. Reading from different perspectives Different readers can read the same story for very different purposes. And they may focus on different parts of the story as well. This can form the basis of a very useful “real-world” type activity. Last year, for example, the Sunday Magazine had a long feature on various islands off the coast of Thailand in the Gulf of Thailand. Each island had different features and thus attracted a different type of tourist. We created short biographies of five very different fictional foreign tourists and divided the class into groups of five. Each group was told to design an appropriate tour for one of the tourists described and to defend their choice in front of the class.

6. Providing background On many occasions, lack of background can be as big a stumbling block as the language. Few Thai students, for example, would understand the significance of the “buffalo” and the American Indian to the history of North America, so when we found an interesting story on the subject, we including a background piece in our teaching materials. This was especially useful because Thailand has a true buffalo—the water buffalo or carabao—which is quite unlike the American bison and a possible source of confusion.

Probably our biggest challenge with background, however, comes with humourous pieces. American humourist Dave Barry has a regular column in the Real Time section and Thais often fail to catch his humour. Fortunately, he has a very distinctive style which can be described, but his many cultural references are a real problem for any teacher who wants to use his material in Thailand.

7. Using context Since many feature stories deal with Thai culture, the subject matter is quite familiar to our readers. The language used, however, can be quite sophisticated and may contain many unfamiliar words. Here we often design exercises to help students guess the meanings from context.

8. Reading faster We periodically design activities to help our readers check their reading speed and take measures to improve it. To do this we look for short features on familiar topics using relatively straightforward language. We give some pre-reading help with vocabulary and include a post-reading test.