Website of the day: BreakingNewsEnglish
What is this?
It is a brilliant website for teachers to teach English news. The news is updated every two or three days. What the teacher have to do is to select a piece of news which will be interesting for their target students and then adopt the activities provided. There are a variety of ready-made activities and they are free of charge.
l There is MP3 file for each piece of news so that students can download it and listen to it again and again.
l There are ready-made pre-reading, during-reading and after-reading activities. Besides, the website also suggests some possible discussion questions and topics for writing.
l All the materials can be printed out in PDF file, which is really convenient for those teachers who don’t have enough time to design worksheets.
l There are a wide range of news topics and are authentic materials.
Classroom use
l Teachers can either use the news as the main material in class Depending on how much time still left, teachers can freely choose what activities they would like to adopt in an English class.
l Teachers can also uses the news as extended reading or as listening practice. Teachers can print out the article and add some adopt some ready-made activities from the website. Some cloze tests or fill in the blanks can also be assigned as homework.
Limitations
l There are too much advertisement on the website, which makes it looks less well-organized. The layout of the website is not attractive for learners. Teachers cannot expect their students to visit the website by themselves. Instead, they have to print out the materials first and carefully design some interesting activities.
l There is no clear division of the level of difficulty in each piece of news. Therefore, teachers have to read them all.
l The speaking speed in the MP3 file is a little bit slow.
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