I chose "Breaking News English" as a material for CALL reading. Each article has Warm-up, Before-Reading task, While-Reading task, and Post-Reading task, which are all well constructed for classroom activity. I think this material can be used for either prep homework or in-class material, since it has a lot of tasks for classroom discution.
First, students collect the background information of the topic through the Before-Reading task. Then, they read the article for the first time, and get the idea of the article. The reading should be repeated if necessary. After reading, they do the While-Reading task, and read the article again to check the answer. (The listening task will follow this task) Finally, they do the Post-Reading task and prepare for class discussion.
If the students are motivated to get wide knowledge about the world, this material will be a very good material because, through each tasks, we need to search and get general background information about the article. However, some students may feel that these tasks are hard for them or less meaningful for their English study, so teacher should be careful of those students when using this kind of material.
Each articles has mp3, so it can also be used for listening. I think it will work better when used for both reading and listening lessons.
I think this is for advanced learners.
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/index.html
This is a great resource, and your lesson plan for students using the site is well designed. In fact, I think you should tweet the link to this resource to share with other ESL teachers on Twitter. In your tweet, include the link, a short description, #ESL #MATESOL at the end of the tweet.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Terrie.
ReplyDeleteI will post the link on Twitter soon!