Learning About the World While Learning English -- Breaking News English

News reports are commonly considered as one of the most useful English langauge learning resouces, because reading and listening to news are basic skills in routine life, also from the news, we are informed of the latest things happend in the English-language speaking countries and districts and get connected to their life and culture with ease. 

However, training the students to news listening and comprehension is always boring and torturous for both teachers and students.

Here comes a fantastic website Breaking News English, which makes teaching and learning news easily and funky!

What is it ?

Breaking News English is a up-to-date website providing free English teaching and learning resouces. Generally, every three days, there is one piece of news updated, more importantly, with a corresponding and comprehensive lesson plan as well as many interesting quizes. Teachers can use it via computer and internet or print out the lesson plan of great layout.


The reasons for choosing Breaking News English

• Two ways of teaching/learning the same piece of news

Every piece of news in this website is designed into both reading tasks and listening tasks. It's up to the teachers' choice. And both the PDF format file and the mp3 format audio file of the news is downloadable for free. Therefore, the students are facilitated with audio materials if they want to listen to the original native speaker's pronunciation and intonation after they finished the reading tasks, and supported by the transcription if they find some difficulties in listening comprehesion.

Free download files

From the perspective of the students' learning motivation, it's quite encouraging for them to know they can get enough help and surpport. Besides, it promotes learning autonomy a lot. The teachers can encourage the students to do the quizes and learning activities by themselves at home if there's time limitation in the class.

• Various well-designed learning activities and quizes

For each lesson, there designed various learning activities and quizes with different target language skills, namely listening, reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, etc.

                                               An example of the table of contents in the lesson plan

Speaking:

Basically, the speaking practices are put in the warming-up (general questions for ice-breaking) and post-activity (more profound questions for discussion) phases. As you can see in the following pictures, the speaking activities includes distinguished modes of problem-solving, debates, peer-interviews, etc., which promotes both cooperation and competition. Besides, students critical thinking and interpersonal skills are also practised.

Two examples of speaking tasks

Listening/ Reading

Listening and Reading are two core target language skills in the lesson plan. Aimed to practise listening/reading skills, there designed a blank-filling task which can be done either by listening to the news article or reading it.

Besides, for better preparing the students with their main tasks and activate their schemata, a couple of pre-activities are offered for choice.

Also, in the post-activity phase, there are more discussions concerning the listening/reading comprehension and social issues related to the news content. It reinforces the students' understanding of the materials and expand their thoughts to the surrounding issues.


Writing

In every lesson plan, there is a 10-minute's writing tasks related to the topic.

An example of the writing task

As you can see in the example above, the instruction of the task is very simple and not appealing to the students. However, it is worth using this task very much as a post-reading/listening activity in the class: after the heated discussions and comprehensive input of the language and knowledge, they students deserve 10 minutes to write their thoughts and points of view down. It is also a chance for the students to think about the language accuracy since they probably only focus on the fluency in their oral tasks. Thus, their piece of work becomes a perfect record of their thoughts as well as the language for future reference.

Another highlight of this activity is that it involves peer-feeback. The students can get their peer students' feedback after they finish, and they can learn from each other at the same time, which can be very collaborative and motivating.
Vocabulary and Grammar:

In every lesson, there are differetiated types of vocabuary and grammar tasks and quizes for the students. Following are some examples.

Traditional grammar practices: multiple choices, blank filling, etc.

  

Multiple choice

                                                      Blank-filling

There are also some interesting online quizes, for example fill-in-the-blank, matching, hangman, flash cards, sentence jumble, missing words, no letters and crossword.

   Different types of vocabulary/grammar tasks and quizzes

Flash cards and Crossword are advised to make into exciting word guessing games as post-activities in the class.

 A brief introduction of the usage of Flash Cards

Crossword

• Time efficiency

The most obvious and direct reason for choosing Breaking News English is time efficiency. Almost all the lesson plan and the activities and homework are offered for free. And every three days, there will be one new lesson updated. Thus, it is very convenient for the teachers to adopt some of them and they don't have to waste a lot of time preparing the teaching materials. However, it is also risky and not recommended to employ the whole set of the lesson without taking the class and students' situation into consideration.

Limitations?

• The genre of the teaching/learning resouces is limited to news. In other words, the students cannot get access to other genres, such as short story, argumentation, exposition, etc.
• It is risky employ the whole set of the lesson without taking the class and students' situation into consideration.
• The layout of the web pages is not neat and organised enough.
• The ads scattered around are annoying and distractive.

Suggestions for Teachers

• The Breaking News English is suggested to be employed both in the listening and reading class, and outside the class as students' homework/ autonomous learning resources.
• Teachers are strongly advised to evaluate and filter the materials before bring them to the class, because the amount of the resources is too big to squeezed into one class.
• The vocabulary quizes in Breaking News English can be developed into exciting guessing games either as the post-activity or as a warming-up activity of the next class.
• To futher motivate the students, the teachers can also look for some concerning pictures or videos.
• The practices provided can also be made into a mini test of reading/listening.

Here is a sample lesson plan provided by Breaking News English.

Love Chocolate Love Learning Vocabulary !

Learning Chocolate is a free vocabulary learning platform which makes learning vocabulary as enjoyable as eating a bar of chocolate! 

• How does it work?

Firstly, when you open the web page of Learning Chocolate, the vocabulary learning journey can be started by choosing the language you prefer to use when learning the target language.

 Learning Chocolate categorises the vocabulay into different groups according to the word meaning. You can choose any of them by a simple click, and then there will appear the list of new words with picture demonstration and the pronunciation aids. They are just working as online word cards.

 

    

In addition, the website provides the learners with various learning activites for practice and review, such as match up (matching up the pronunciation and the spelling; matching up the spelling and the picture; matching up the pronunciation and the picture), fill in (spelling activities with picture cues), and dictation.

• The reasons for choosing Learning Chocolate

1)  Choosing language:
     The learners are provided the opportunities to choose their instrumental language (either their mother tongue or the target language itself) when learning the vocabulary. It is obviously rather practical and effective for the beginners to use the language they have acquired to learn a new language. On the other hand, for the learners who have already get some knowledge of the target language, it is very beneficial to expose them to the target language and get the input as much as possible.

2)  Learning the vocabulary in groups
     From the cognitive perspective, categorising the vocabulary in certain groups can improve the efficiency of the memorisation and acquisition. To be specific, the words within a group are associated with each other in terms of the lexical  meaning as well as the using context, thus the words put together are sensible enough to the learners and easier to memorise.

     Also, by grouping the vocabuary, Learning Chocolate is showing a possible example of 'word cards' for the learners themselves to make their own word cards or word notebooks  .

3)  Easy access to the word pronunciation
     The learners can constanctly check the pronunciation of the word, if they like, by simply clicking the speaker button. It is efficient and good for the accuracy of learning.

4)  Visual aids
     Generally, the whole website of Learning Chocolate is colorful and attractive. It boosts the learners' motivation of using this website and learning the vocabulary with it, especially for those young learners.

      More importantly, the vocabulary is demonstrated with nice pictures, which is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to explain the meaning of a word.

5) Various follow-up activities for practice and revision
    It is far from enough of just showing and illustrating the vocabulary to learners to achieve the final acquisition. Learning Chocolate's learning activities involve the learners to practise the new words frequently with aspects of spelling, pronunciation and word meaning. By this means, the learners' understanding and memorisation of the words are reinforced.

    In terms of learning autonomy, the follow-up activities can serve as the self-test materials for the learners, which is also a good way to monitor their own learning of new words.

• Limitations ?

    Despite that the website is free for use, it has some advertisement on the pages, which could be confusing and distractive sometimes.

      The rang of the listed vocabulary is limited. To be clear, the vocabuary that suitable for visual demanstration tend to me concrete things in the world rather than those conveying abstract meanings, since they hardly have physical referents in real world.

• Suggestions for Teachers

      The teachers are advised to use Learning Chocolate  as a suplement when teaching vocabulary.

      In the class, the teacher can use it as a warming-up activity to review the vocabulary that has been covered in the previous class. Also, it is brilliant to use it to introduce the new vocabulary.

      In addition, the teacher can recommend the students to use this website as voluntary homework in case some students want to learn and practise more after the class.