Breaking News English

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Breaking New English (BNE) is a website that contains a huge resource of content, which provides thorough lesson plans for all types of learners. There will always be one level with all of the resources available, and then the materials are edited and moulded for lower or upper level students accordingly. For lower level students, the new creations of the material provides an opportunity for them to work up to the main version, as this will improve confidence and ease them in gently. There are usually 20+ pages of materials, so it's important to be selective, by picking and choosing the most relevant activities for your students. Listening and reading takes the focus of the 4 skills, but you can tailor your lesson to include the other skills if needs be. There is also a wealth of resources which promotes lexis and grammar. Moreover, the news stories are really engaging and quirky, as can be seen below:

How can this site be used?

• In the classroom - You could print out the PDF of the lesson that you like the look of, and identify the activities and tasks which you think are most beneficial to your students.
• Flipped classroom - You could get your students to read an article or listen to an audio at home, so they're ready to pull it apart and analyse it when they come to class.
• Outside the classroom - You could highlight the activities that you want your students to do at home, but it's probably wise to show them how to navigate the site, and where they can access the activities in class so they're prepared to do it autonomously.

Which level?

Some useful and engaging activities

Jumble

• After students have been exposed to the text, you could put your students in pairs or small groups to try and rebuild the text collaboratively.
• Although there might be some L1 usage in monolingual classes, the students use their language processing to complete the task effectively. Plus they'll be continuously debating, clarifying, questioning, and confirming, which are useful skills for learners to take outside the classroom.
• This will help students vocabulary, syntax and grammar by highlighting other skills such as collocation and colligation.
• The scoring system offers the opportunity for friendly competition between teams.

No letters

• Similar to how a dictogloss used to be. After being exposed to the text, students are required to input the words they think appeared in the text. Students will most probably think of articles (as can be seen above), and prepositions first but will have to cast their minds back to the text in order to recall all of the words.
• Perfect for pair or group work as students will have to negotiate and collaborate to rebuild the text from scratch. They'll be throwing out lots of vocab and previous knowledge too.
• The incorrect words and your score will show on screen which adds a competitive element to proceedings. You could encourage students to use dictionaries. For the incorrect words, as an extension activity, you could get students to think of synonyms or antonyms which obviously helps language learning.
• Helps with lexis, grammar, tests high level discourse analytical skills such as collocation (verbs and noun phrases), and encourages autonomy.
• Teacher's can look at the common words that students are getting wrong and make a point to teach this as a whole class.

A few final thoughts...

• This is a very dynamic site as it presents language in an innovative and non-static way.
• The feedback you receive on the site is instant...but fairly limited as it only tells you if it's right or wrong, but not why. This is where teacher intervention is very important to explain any ambiguity.
• The dictation function on the site is very good for learners to repetitively listen to an audio. For example, this would be great if they wanted to focus on weak forms from a US or British accent. However, non-native speaker accents aren't available which could be a limitation.
• The search function is very useful and can take you wherever you want to go.
• Listen A Minute  is the offspring of BNE - this site is ideal for lower levels (A2 - B1) as it takes the essence of BNE but contains less material, shorter texts, and the lessons are organised by genre/topic so it's easier to navigate.
• It's free and contains a ridiculous amount of resources. The most important things for teachers to be aware of is that you should be selective when choosing activities, and  expose students to the site by bringing it to life in the classroom before asking them to do activities outside the classroom.