Journalist, Matt Salusbury, tries out a new book on English for journalists with his MA Media students

This coursebook is aimed at professionals and students in vocational colleges – native speakers as well as English language learners. It covers everything from being interviewed for a journalism school through to online advertising, radio formats, media ethics and the challenges facing journalism.

My review copy came with a few audio tracks and a text file of the teacher’s book. The student’s book is divided into three sections, each having 15 units of one spread each.

There’s also a glossary of at least five pages of journalistic jargon at the end of each section. Having three manageable subdivisions is necessary, because you couldn’t possibly learn all that vocabulary in one go,

Each unit opens with questions to prompt group discussions before a vocabulary-rich reading text. Exercises include true or false comprehension, specialist vocabulary matching to definitions and fill-in-the-blanks, followed by brief listening, speaking and writing activities.

I was able to test some of Journalism’s units with a class preparing for MA courses in Media and Public Relations. These went down very well.

In an early try-out, a single page of exercises stimulated an in-class discussion that took up most of a 45-minute lesson. Students “got” the format very quickly – in my next road test, the same class whizzed through it in less than half that time and were eager to start on the next unit.

Journalism would be an excellent introduction to media terminology, both for trainees and old hacks who’ve perfected their craft in their first language and now need to do the same in English. It’s suitable for workers from the broader media industry – public relations and media studies students, for example.

“So engaging and accessible is the material that it’s a joy to use”

This textbook fills a clear gap in the market. As an editor who has previously mentored entry-level journos with English as a second language, I would have liked to have had Journalism on hand to give my colleagues an occasional unit to go through with me. I know many other editors who would agree.

The terminology of journalism is, however, so dense that it’s hard to cover everything in one textbook. Co-author Charles Moore is an editor on US regional newspapers, so there were some Americanisms like “skyboxes” and “brites” that I’d not heard of in well over a decade of UK journalism.

By contrast, much British English journo-speak, of the sort that would trip up nonnative speakers working in the UK news industry, is absent. For example, ‘spiked’ (when a story doesn’t make it to press), ‘orphans’ (text that leaves too much space in a line) and ‘screamers’ (exclamation marks) were all missing. Journalism is suitably global, though, with Qatar’s Al Jazeera and China’s Xinhua getting a look in.

Non-specialist teachers will need to prepare carefully to use the book. General English language teachers might have difficulty explaining what ‘metadata tags’ are – this came up in one vocabulary exercise, and my students were still slightly baffled after my long explanation with examples.

There should also be a health warning with the section on ‘Libel and slander’– use of the word ‘allegedly’ in articles will not protect you in a libel case heard before the courts of England and Wales, as one exercise would seem to suggest.

With the emphasis on vocabulary, there is no coverage of the strange grammar so specific to news reporting (the ‘is to’ future form, for example.)

I would also have liked to have seen more self-study material as part of the course. To get onto a UK journalism course you need Ielts of 7 to 7.5 or equivalent. Many nonnative speaker journalists feel they have to keep quiet at work about the fact that their English isn’t perfect. So they’re most likely to study English for journalism at home alone, through clandestine study.

But so engaging and accessible is the material that it’s a joy to use, with a minimum of preparation for any teachers familiar with the media industry. I always like textbooks where the answers are so clear you don’t have to look them up or check them in the teachers’ manual when you’re preparing. I was pleased to find that this was one of them.

Recommended.