Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Conservative Sarkozy Wins French Presidential Election, 05/07/07
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/france_5-07.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What do you know about France?

2. Who won the recent French presidential election?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Who were the two main candidates in the French election? Who won and by what margin?

Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, defeated socialist Segolene Royal, the first woman to get this far in a French presidential election, by 53 percent of the vote to Royal's 47 percent.

2. What is the 35-hour workweek? How was it significant in the recent French election?

The main thrust of Sarkozy's argument for improving the French economy, the sixth biggest in the world, has been to eliminate the 35-hour workweek to allow people to "work more in order to get more."

The 35-hour workweek comes from a 2000 French law that states that after working 35 hours in one week a worker must get overtime pay. The law's creators hoped that it would help create jobs for more people and give workers more personal time.

But critics, like Sarkozy, say the law has not created more jobs and should be changed. They claim that companies expect employees to do more work in less time instead of hiring more workers.

3. Why do many in France's immigrant community dislike the new president-elect?

Many in France's immigrant community loath the tough-talking politician, who in 2005 referred to the perpetrators -- many of whom were blacks and Arabs -- of a three-week wave of rioting over employment problems as "scum."

Sarkozy has refused to apologize for the comment and has expressed a commitment to remain tough on crime and to create laws to tighten criteria for immigrants who want to bring their families to France.

4. How has the president-elect indicated he might relate to the United States? How does this compare to the last French president?

He reached out to the United States in his acceptance speech, stressing that it can "count on our friendship," but he added that "friendship means accepting that friends can have different opinions."

Under Chirac, France and the United States disagreed sharply on the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues. Sarkozy is seen as much friendlier to U.S. policy and interests.

5. What did the president-elect call on the United States to do?

Sarkozy also called on the United States to lead the global effort against climate change, an issue France would make a priority.

"A great nation, like the United States, has a duty not to block the battle against global warming but -- on the contrary -- to take the lead in this battle, because the fate of the whole of humanity is at stake," he said, according to the AP.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. What challenges will Nicolas Sarkozy face as he tries to unite France under his leadership? How might these impact his economic and social goals?

2. Compare immigration in France to immigration in the United States. How are they similar and how are they different? How are politicians and leaders in both countries responding to these issues?

3. Why is it significant that Nicolas Sarkozy will be the first president born after World War II? How did the war shape France's history throughout the last 60 years?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.