Are you looking for contemporary material that you can use in your ELT or ESL classrooms if you are
this is the video for you I'm going to show you five websites that I really like that
have either got news stories or video stories that are really contemporary and that there's
always at least some free material and in some cases the complete website is free
really hope you like the video and as always if you do please like the video please share
it with other teachers of course join me on my YouTube channel and comment love to
know of the five websites i'm going to show you which one you like the best let's get started
so this is a particularly useful site for lower level students it's called simple english news
it does exactly that it's very easy to use i'm only going to focus on just a few of the things
let's jump in for example to plastic bottles on your tire yeah and if i click here
and then you'll see that it's a very short
news article but you've also got the listening here let's just quickly play an example
plastic bottle on your tire someone may want to rub you if you find a plastic bottle stuck between
the tire and fender of your car it might be a sign of trouble okay so you get an idea in lovely clear
audio very simple to work with very short very short news article though the vocabulary is quite
rich often and then afterwards you've got a little focus on some of the important words it's a very
simple site to use great though if you're looking to get quick access to audio files
that you can use i would really encourage you to show this to your students as something
they can do on their own if they want to get lots of exposure to listening and at low levels
this website is called news in levels it's very clearly organized as you can see
and it does exactly that it provides the news in various levels I'm going to jump down and
give you an example let's click on this story here about Ellon musk if I click on level one
again notice we've got an audio file and again we've got here the actual story again this
can be so useful for students who are you know wanting to get as much exposure to the language
as possible let's just demonstrate how the audio sounds Ellon musk is the richest man in the world
he buys twitter twitter is a public company since 2013. okay now you notice that's probably
coming from kind of some type of voice software however I must say the voice is very very clear
the interesting thing is as well is that you can actually go to the same story but jump to level
two now this isn't something I've ever done but it could be quite interesting to do an activity
with students where perhaps you start at level one and then jump to level two and then jump
to level three so each level extends the story slightly more but again still provides the
audio files I like the way this website is organized it's really easy to find your
stories and absolutely loads of loads of them there on the first page and you can see you can
also jump down to stories that were previously produced but obviously if you're looking for
something contemporary you're probably going to want to take the stuff from the first page
now this video is really focusing on quick websites you can go to and access the content
straight away if you're looking for something a bit more elaborated where there's lots and lots
of content and you probably need to spend a little bit of time looking at it but it's very good level
look at Voice of America now I'm not going to focus on Voice of America but I'm going to put a
link on the screen now if you want to access Voice of America and find out about it I'm going to move
on to my third site now and this is one I've been particularly impressed with and you're gonna see
why when I show you uh the content now this next site I'm particularly impressed with it hasn't
got completely free material but there is enough for you to do a taster there's certainly enough
material that you could share and use in your class with your students and you may even think
about actually paying for this content because I think it's very well done but if you come
over here to get free lessons so I'm just coming straight in and I'm gonna concentrate on the free
lesson so you will need to sign up to this let me just give you an example of the sort of thing that
is available let's choose this one here okay so it gives you the date of when it was updated which is
really nice as well gives you information about the downloads there if I click on this we get a
video story but what's more interesting is that we get either a printable or interactive lesson plan
as well as lots of information about the actual lesson here now this material has been really well
developed let me show you what I mean by that let's just click here on download printable lesson
plan I'm very impressed with the quality of this content and all the work that's gone into making
it look really presentable well organized it's a complete lesson plan for a teacher
what you might actually find is that there's almost too much material here and you may want to
pick and choose the content that you use but you can see that this is really really well produced
well organized and of course nice and contemporary connected to current news and contemporary stories
now with Fluentize you will need to log in to make use of it but if I click over
here on lessons once you're logged in and then click on all free lessons you'll see
you've got all these free lessons here that you can make use of this so it's a great start for
you to try out and of course you could look into buying additional content as you can see
it's not particularly expensive particularly if you're teaching private lessons online
in groups or working with the school it may be something you would consider that's fluent eyes
just a really quick break from the video I hope you're enjoying the video and if you are
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about every five days let's get back to the video this is a website that's been around for ages
again it was one that I always it to my students I particularly like this website because it's got
lots of recordings with other students speaking English so the nice thing is that people get to
hear a huge variety of accents and of course one of the nice things about this website is
that it's very contemporary because a lot of the time they're talking about contemporary issues
let's look at the video content for example if we just click here on video content look
at some of the topics do you like taking selfies is it okay to take pictures of people in public
would you like to own cryptocurrency very very kind of contemporary topics and if we click on one
of them there's a couple of nice features on this website straight away you get a recording as I've
said you get different accents this one for example is going to be from the Philippines
we get the transcript which we can either show or hide and we normally get some types
of activities that we can do as well again a nice website for students to work on their own
it might be a website that you want to spend a little bit more time on because it has actually
got loads and loads of material sometimes the content on this website is a little bit
overwhelming it's a little bit difficult to find but for example the video section is pretty easy
and there's a lot of material there that you can start with and it also shows you where the accents
are coming from so you've got both native and non-native speakers the final website I'm going to
recommend is this one called the no project it was shortlisted for the British Council ELTON's awards
and it deals with the topic of modern day slavery and obviously it helps students to become aware
of this issue through some very well developed materials so if you click
over here on lesson plans you get complete lesson plans on all of these different topics
and if we click on the lesson plan we can download it and the lesson plan will often
constitute a whole variety of different documents that allow you to prepare and they're the reading
material and the exercises for the students to do so there really is a lot of content here and
it will include an audio file etc let me just give you a taster of some of the material so along with
the audio file and the worksheets and the lesson plan you get for example that in this particular
one for example the interview written out as a script as well so it's really worth looking
at this website and I have actually focused on this website in the past and on the screen now
there's a link to a more detailed video about using this website it's called the no project
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videos that you might find interesting if you're a language teacher and looking for free content.