Breaking news English

Many English teachers use newspaper articles as teaching materials to help learners with their vocabulary, reading and writing abilities. However, where to obtain appropiate English news for language learning and how to use these materials to facilatate students' learning is constantly a headache for all language teachers.
Today I want to introduce to all of you a very useful website called "Breaking news English", here is the link: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/

What is it?
This website keeps updating latest news reports on social issues and events. It is accessible to all readers and full of ready-to-use exercises for English language learning. Meanwhile, it provides a PDF version of all the exercises and newspaper articles on this website. Teachers can easily download all those files and print them out as teaching materials for students.

What are the advanteges of this website?

1. it provides lots of language exercises like gap filling, multiple choice, and questions design which can help students improve their reading ability. Meanwhile, exercises like no letters, sentence jumble, and missing words can help students strengthen their memory and enlarge their vocabulary.
2. it provides a PDF version of all those handouts
3. MP3 file is attached to every listening material and the pronounciation is very clear which can also help students with their spoken language
4. the articles on this website are from latest news report which means students can not only learn English but also broaden their hosizon of the world

Here are some examples of the exercises provided on this website:

1.  Crosswords

2. Missing words

3. No letters

4. Matching

What is the relevance to language teaching?

• this website is a fantastic tool for self-study learners since they can use it to take quizes and check the answers afterwards.
• language teachers can use this website to help with the lesson plans, for example, the teacher may find the warm-up questions very useful and interesting and apply them into the lesson plan
• the teacher can choose some excersises of this website to make homework for the students.
• this website can also encourage students' group work or pair work, for example, the exercise of filling in the missing words may need combined efforts of the students

What are the limitations?

• the questions and answers are in the same page. Students may want to refer to the answers and don't think deeply
• there are too much content and exercises for one article, and some of them are not very good designed. So some of the materials need evaluation and adaption by the teacher according to different teaching context