Reading the news: A pilot study on Italian students' understanding of English journalistic texts

English newspaper headlines use non-standard morpho-syntactical and lexical features rendering meaning opaque or ambiguous, even for native speakers (Montcomble 2018). Steeped in culturemes and ideological stances, news discourse is constructed in specific socio-cultural contexts and therefore needs considerable cognitive effort and lingua-cultural competence for the non-native speaker to fully understand. Using online newspapers in the L2 classroom is thus a double-edged sword: on the one hand, students are exposed to authentic, situated language that reports on current affairs and socio-cultural issues, thus enriching their learning experience; on the other, the teacher has the onerous task of unravelling the obscurities intrinsic to the language of newspapers. This contribution reports on action research carried out in an L2 classroom of a post-graduate International Studies programme at the University of Pisa. The classroom practice aimed to encourage students to critically engage with news texts, focusing on three learning objectives: 1. to unpack and infer meanings from news headlines; 2. to apply a critical discourse analysis tool kit (Machin and Mayr 2012) to the construal of news discourse; 3. to reflect critically on and discuss the content of selected news articles presented in class. The dataset includes transcriptions of extracts from the classes streamed and recorded on Microsoft TEAMS, and survey feedback from the students who participated on the successes and failures of the classroom practice.