Breaking News English

This is an excellent site for teachers, simply because it provides vast amounts of up-to-date materials. The students can also use this website to practice their language skills, as it offers a lot of quizzes and many other types of exercises.

How can we use it?

http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/

Copy and paste the above web address or simply click on the picture at the top of this post, and you will be directed to the website. On the homepage you should see the most recent chosen topics from which you can choose. 

Of course, if you wish you can navigate all the lessons the website has, or you can either search for a particular lesson or click on the predefined categories at the bottom of the page, which should look like the following. 

Once you have chosen the lesson, you can see the reading material and the long lesson plan as you scroll down. There are infact two versions of the lesson plans, the long one you can see when scrolling down and a mini-version. 

As you can see the lesson plans have versions where it is much easier to print. There are so many materials in this site that I will not be able to cover them all. The activities are divided into categories and skills quite well. Essentially, the teachers can take their lesson materials according to the lesson plan from these categories, but I feel it will be more effective when used by the students. Apart from the lesson plans, all these activities are interactive. 

For example, the text jumble activity provides students with a tiles containing parts of text from the main reading material, but their order is mixed up. The students will have to re-order them in the correct order. If they find it too difficult, they can reduce the number of tiles, and if they find it too easy, they can also increase it, by using the buttons on the bottom right. They can also easily check their progress by enabling "Auto check" or check whether they ordered them correctly after by using the buttons on the bottom left. 

Other activities are just as interactive as this one, and if a teacher was to organise these materials in the classroom without computers, he/she can print this out and cut the tiles and distribute them to different groups in the class. Most of them are not difficult to reproduce into printable materials except for quizzes. 

Benefits and Limitations

• Up to date news topics which can be engaging to students
• Easy to produce lesson materials even if there are no computers for the whole class
• Materials for all levels
• 40+ activities on most lessons
• Good for practise outside of lessons
• A lot of advertisements
• Can be confusing when navigating
• Some news topics can be offensive to certain students
• Teachers will need to decide on the materials more carefully
• Although the topics may be authentic, the actual reading material is not