Breaking News English

• What is BreakingNewsEnglish?

Now I would like to introduce one brilliant website to all of you. It is BreakingNewsEnglish.

After entering the home page of BNE, you can see a list of news.

Click one of the news, you will see the content of the news, and the relevant tasks according to the news. You have many choices to make:

1. Print the news and relevant tasks;
2. Listen to the news, in British accent or American accent;
3. Do some reading exercises, such as: Speed Reading, Text Jumble etc;
4. Grammar practice;
5. Practice spelling skills;
6. Extend your vocabulary by doing various tasks.

For example, in the Sentence Jumble, after reading the news, you can choose the pieces of the sentences from the news by memory. The system also displays your scores in this task. If teachers use this task in the reading class, that would be very interesting. Teachers can ask the students finish memorizing the news as fast as they can, then compare the scores.

In No Spaces, which is one of the most challenging tasks, you can type the words that you can remember as many as possible. Considering its difficulty, teachers may divide the students into different groups and make students try to recall the words in the news.

After reading the news, you can also take a quiz to test whether you comprehend the passage or not.

• Why is the content good for the language learning?

1. To teachers in teaching listening, reading, writing and grammar, BNE provides more various tasks.
2. To students, they will be highly motivated by the tasks and will improve their listening and reading skills through practicing different tasks.
3. This website is also useful to self-learners.

• How might you use it in a language teaching context?

1. Teachers can use BNS in class to organize different activities.
2. When lack of teaching resources, teachers can find more valuable ideas in this website.
3. With high motivation, students will love learning English through doing different tasks.

• Limitations

1. If using in the class, it is required that each student should bring their computers or use one computer for two students.
2. The level of news in language is hard to control.
3. Too many advertisements on the webpage. Users would easily click and access to the wrong pages.