Breaking News in English

Today, I would like to share with you a tool which I have been using from time to time, called Breaking New English.

Breaking News in English is maybe one  the largest site of learning content in English  for learning English. 

It basically takes contemporary news items, simplifies them and builds a whole range of activities around them, including listening, reading comprehension, quizzes, gap-filling, spelling activities with lots of grammar and vocabulary exercises. They are all based on the same article.

Once you have chosen the article you want to work on with your students, you need to choose the level which you think is more appropriate for your students. You will soon notise that not each level has got the same amount of activities. The higher is the level the more activities it has.

Since there are lots and lots of activities you will have to select the once you want your students to complete.

Some interesting activities worth pointing out:

Listening

• We can decide whether we want to listen to American or British accent;
• Discussion questions, where students will only hear the questions. They can then work either in pairs or on their own to answer those questions;
• Listen & Spell you will only hear words in isolation
• Dictation: You are asked to write the whole sentence
• They have just added 5 listening speeds for each level which is particularly suitable for beginner students

Reading

• 4 reading speeds  Again this could be also done in pairs: one student looks at the text the other reads;
• Jumble: the text has been broken up and placed into different order.  We need to track the words into the correct order. You can even make it easier or more difficult.
• Text Jumble: the whole text has to be rewritten. Listen to text a couple of times .. You could work in pairs or do a competition.
• no space: All of the spaces and punctuation have been removed from the text. We have to put back the spaces and punctuation.

Spelling

• no-letters: you will have to write the whole text. We now try to rebuild the text trying to remember all the information. This will definitely generate lots of vocabularay
• Hangman for a bit of fun

Vocabulary

• Matching: you will have to look it through
• gap-fill
• word pairs
• crosswords

Grammar

• Grammar exercises will be different from article to article and they will also depend very much on the level selected.

You will notise that the website is actually full of advertisments, which explains the reason why the platform is free. However, that is not really a problem because you can actually print out or dowload the PDF files containing the the same amount of activities with their answer keys but with no adverts. 

There is also a mini lesson being offered for each article which is basically the same lesson but with far less activities and exercises.

One last feature to mention. If you have the necessity to work on particular topics related to your subjct area you can always look through the research themes as shown below.