Are you looking for interesting material that's free that you can use for teaching english to
your students in the classroom or maybe it's material that you can suggest that your students
work on at home for homework and help them to develop their autonomous learning
i'm going to show you one of the most well-known websites for learning english that provides
free material but what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you some of the features that you
probably don't know about now I know this particular website really well
in fact so well that the founder of the website on several occasions has asked me to present
the website to various audiences so what I'm going to do in this video is show you five features
in breaking news english that you probably don't realize exist I really hope you like the video and
as always if you do please like it please share it with other teachers love to hear your comments
which feature do you like the best and of course join me on my youtube channel let's get started
when you come to break and use english you'll see the latest stories on the screen and there
are these levels but i like working with the main content so if you click here because the
main content will give you nearly all of the different features that I want to focus on
now really quickly just going to point out to you that the best thing is you've got a lesson
plan here and a short lesson plan and here you can actually listen to the news article now you
can scroll down and quickly read it okay but the best thing is to actually print out these
plans because there are no adverts in them now if you click here you'll see that you've got
the news uh article well read out in various accents including in a north american accent
or in a british accent and you can play these very simply by just clicking here people in tokyo
asked to turn off lights in heatwave and also you can actually download from here the
article now what I want to focus on though is something completely different so if we
just jump back the first game that I really like is that after you've either listened or
read the article or perhaps done both come over to this exercise exercise called text jumble
and in text jumble what you have to do is rebuild the whole text so you've already listened to it
or you've already read it or perhaps done both and now what you can do is try to rebuild it so
um this one probably starts with b japan is experiencing a record heat wave last
week etcetera now this is great for reading it's great for syntax it's great obviously for
vocabulary and for reworking the reading of the text or if you've listened to it then really just
trying to see how much you understand and i really like getting my students in class to work in pairs
to do this exercise of course you would need access to computers in the class but of course
you could get the students to do this exercise for homework it does give you the score as well
so if you do an exercise wrong so last week the temperature and i let's click here now my score
is going to go down okay and now it's down to 87 this is a really is a website and a particularly
this activity i really like but i'm going to show you some other ones now that i like even more
so we can get back by just clicking here and what i'm going to do now is show you an activity that
i really like working with and it's called no letters now i've done this in other languages
actually i did i've done it in french and it's great for listening the idea is that you've
got to try to reproduce the whole text and you can listen to it and just try to reproduce the
text now it's very easy at the start because you can write in words like the and and and the heat
okay and let's put in words like weather and most of these words you know are going to be in there
because you've already listened but after a while it gets harder and harder to do this
and normally what you have to end up doing is listening very carefully to try to complete
the text now it does say several things one of the things it does is obviously helps you to
build up words around a particular genre so for example this one's about
weather and climate change and heat and tokyo etc but also what it does is it's
like an intensive listening because in the end what you need to do is to click and listen
people in tokyo asked to turn off lights in heatwave okay so then what i can do is i can start
to write in words that i think are going to be in the text based on the listening so it's great as
a listening exercise now one of the reasons i like this so much is that students can do this
on their own at home now my suggestion would be that you perhaps do this activity in the class
first and then point out to students that they can actually do these activities at home for free
this website every two a day two or three days offers a new news article
now if you think that that level is too high i'm going to put on the screen now a link to another
video that shows you exactly the same exercise but at lower level down to a kind of a2b1 level
now another gem on this website and again another great website for developing listening skills is
to come down to here and click on dictation now the reason i like this again is it's the type of
exercise that students can do at home i currently learn polish i find these types of exercise
really useful and what the idea here is is that you're kind of building just the sentence so let's
listen last week the temperature in eastern japan reached 40 degrees c now last week the temperature
so you can plot it back as many times as you want and then of course you can you don't have
to do the words in order so for example i can write last in fact let's just put the so last
week okay the temperature and i'm going to put reached and you'll see that if i now press enter
it will bring those it will place those words into the sentence in the in the in the correct
reached so last week the now you can add that so you can do it as you want and of course you
can play it back again in eastern japan reached so you can try to build up the text and complete
okay the text as much as you possibly can again a great exercise yes it could be done
in class but i particularly like these types of exercises to encourage students to do them at
home for homework now if you do particularly like these gamey type activities i'm going to suggest
on the screen now a video that you might want to click on that takes you over to word wall which
is another great website for making games and activities that you can do with your students
now there are masses of grammar exercises on this website but i tend to focus on activities that
give me exposure to either listening that well particularly to listening material and another
one i'm going to focus on that i like is this one here and it's different to the other activities
this listen and spell you've got to listen out for specific words that are missing from the sentences
again this is a really good exercise to do after you've read or you've listened to the text and
perhaps done a few of the other exercises now what happens is that it simply reads out the
missing word you've got to listen and write it in so let me just give you an example spelling one
experiencing okay so then i've got to come in here and write the word in here okay experiencing
and then i can play again
experiencing to temperature
temperature notice you do actually get to hear the word twice which i think is a good
idea and then again you're going to have to write the word in into the uh into the box
after you've written all the words in you can just come down to the bottom here and click
on check your answers and see whether or not you've got the answers wrong or right
so you get instant feedback but what i like about all these activities as
i showed you so far is that they're really working on developing your listening skills
now if you like this kind of material lots of listening material and you're looking for perhaps
even more free material i'm going to suggest on the screen now another website that you might
like which is called voice of america that also provides lots and lots of listening material for
students just a super quick break from the video if you like what you see and you want more videos
particularly perhaps on language learning come over to teachertrainingvideos.com click on this
section here for languages but you'll also see some of the best language learning material on
the front page if you want to do one of my courses you can find out about them here and if you want
to sign up to my newsletter there are about 10 000 people on it now then you do get the regular
updates of the new videos that i've added up onto youtube but also the free webinars that i run
the courses that i run and the blog that i write which you can access here on the front page at the
bottom of the screen and at the moment there's a special offer on the newsletter you will get sent
13 videos every three or four days you'll be sent one video that go over the most popular videos
that i've presented on teachertrainingvideos.com right let's get back to the video
as i've said there's masses of material here it's worth looking through everything and deciding what
you like personally i quite like this activity here it's simply a writing one really good to do
again after you've done several of the other activities and all you need to do here is to
rewrite the sentences in the correct order so it's really about syntax it's about grammar building
and again afterwards you can click on the check button so those are just five of the activities
that i like and the often teachers don't know about when i present this technology they're often
very surprised particularly with things like text jumble no letters and the dictation options that
were available but the other thing is to make sure that you don't make use of this page here this
is just gives you a quick idea of what content is available the best thing to do is to click on the
27 lesson plan or if you haven't got much time try working with the two page mini lesson plan
really hope you like that video please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com
as i said before there's loads of content on the opening page you'll also see information
about my latest courses that you can sign up to you can subscribe to the newsletter
and of course you can also follow me on my youtube channel and i'm going to leave now
on the screen a couple of other videos that you might find really interesting
that cover language learning in english and free material that you can suggest to your students