Newspapers and magazines and books can be useful language learning materials even for beginning learners. You can use them at all levels.

Beginning Learners:

Look for words you already have learned to understand when you hear them. You can buy a newspaper and underline all the words you know. After that, have a guess at what the article is about. Sometimes there is a picture to help you out. In magazines or newspapers, are there advertisements? What are they advertising? Talk this over with your LH.

As for books, look for books at your reading level, even if that is for the smallest children. Even books with one sentence per page and a picture can help you learn to read! Don’t try to read books where you have to look up a lot of words on every page. That isn’t really reading – that’s a different kind of exercise.

Intermediate Learners:

Look for magazines about topics that interest you. You don’t have to be reading great literature at this stage – Sports or fashion magazines are OK, or magazines about pop culture. They will help you learn something about the overall culture of the place you are living in.

A good way to learn both language and culture is to read children’s school books at a level you can handle. Even first grade school books will have a lot of cultural information and civics and moral lessons people want their children to learn. There will also be lessons about the history and heroes of the nation. Reading children’s school books is a good way to learn what all the adults learned when they were growing up.