Stay Informed with Breaking News English

What is Neil Armstrong famous for? How much food do Americans waste? What is the danger of global warming?  These are the tough questions that can be answered by reading the most recent articles posted on BreakingNewsEnglish.com, a superbly thorough and meaningful resource site for language educators. The concept of this website is simple enough: Current events from around the world are written in plain English, with no unnecessary news jargon that requires you to look up every other word in the dictionary. Half a page of news worthy material is strategically condensed to a maximum of two paragraphs, keeping the meaning and interesting facts in the reading passage. 

Not only does the website creator Sean Banville do an excellent job with the news articles, he provides an extensive lesson plan (enough for about 2 hours+ of class!) for each article. The extra activities help the students actively engage with the written material, not only by absorbing information but also by sharing opinions. This may be a good time to say that the news content is most appropriate for students in the High Intermediate to Advanced class levels.

Despite the abundance of a variety of news articles that discuss different events, the lesson plans always follow a similar structured format to keep things organized and facilitates easy learning habits. I would like to break down each section of the lesson plan and share my thoughts about how each part can be used effectively in the language classroom.

Warm-Ups

This section consists of many good ideas for encouraging the students to work in pairs. Some ideas include discussions about the most interesting and boring words/concepts in the article, completing a table about the subject (ex: sharing opinions),  debating about beliefs, ranking concepts from best to worst, and writing word associations. All these activities promote active thinking and clear expressions of opinions, but it may be best to choose just one or two to get the ball rolling.

Before Reading/Listening

This section includes questions to show what the students already know prior to reading or listening to the article. This includes True/False statements, synonym match (similar meanings of words), and phrase match. These can be used as small group or pair work activities, and answers can be discussed as a whole class.

While Reading/Listening

Creating English sentences is like a jigsaw puzzle. Words that correspond to different parts of speech must fall into the correct place in the sentence: nouns come after articles, adjectives come before nouns, and so on.  One activity in this section is the Gap Fill: students must fill in each blank with one correct word that they can choose from a word list on the side. This exercise tests logical reading skills. Another activity in this section is for students to fill in each blank with the word they hear, given the context of the story. The teacher (or an advanced student) can be chosen to dictate the script. 

After Reading/Listening

It is important to follow any reading activity with review activities to ensure understanding and comprehension. This section offers several different ways to review the reading, including a word search (finding collocations to the given words), article questions, vocabulary (circling and discussing unclear words), and testing each other with word meanings.

Survey

Students have a chance to interview their fellow classmates with three questions that they create relating to the topic. When everyone is finished, the teacher can call on some students to share their answers. 

Discussion

This is my favorite activity in the lesson plan for pair discussions. Student A gets a set of 10 questions relating to the subject matter, and interviews Student B.  After Student B answers the questions, he/she will ask the other 10 questions to Student A.  After all students are finished, the teacher can select a few questions to prompt a comprehensive class discussion.

Language – Multiple Choice

This section allows students to choose the correct fill-in-the-blank answer from the given four choices. This can be used as a pre-reading activity or post-reading (comprehension) activity.

Writing

This section allows students to write freely for 10 (or more) minutes about the given topic. After writing, students can exchange papers for peer editing .

Homework

Some homework ideas provided in the lesson plans include searching for more information about the topic on the Internet, making a poster to display the findings, and writing a magazine article about interesting facts. It is up to the teacher to decide what homework activities work best for the class.

At the end of each lesson plan, you will find the correct answers for the various reading comprehension activities.  Perhaps the best thing about these activities is that they are adaptable to student level, student interest, and class time. Unless you plan to devote the entire class session on the news and current events, it is possible you will not use everything. It is helpful to pick and choose what your students need the most help on, what kind of activities you want them to practice (ex: reading, listening, vocabulary acquisition, sharing opinions, etc.), and what will grab the students’ attention.

Reading about current events and engaging in discussion is now more exciting and meaningful. Go ahead and check out the breaking news!