Monthly News Digest

Monthly News Digest Online has been designed so that English learners can use it on their own, or in groups in the classroom. It is posted on the first day of each month and includes audio feeds, texts and exercises. You can find a link to it from the English Club homepage. Below you will find ideas on how to use this resource as a whole-language tool on a daily, weekly or monthly basis in your classroom. Whether you want to fill a two-hour class or a five minute warm up, this is a useful teaching tool that will save you time and add variety to your lessons.

A Weekly Exercise

One way of using the monthly news digest is to focus on one story each week. This is particularly useful in classrooms that have enrollment once a month. Depending on whether or not you have computers at your school or in your classroom, you can have students do some of the work on their own for homework and some of it in the classroom in pairs or groups. Below you will see a breakdown of how to test all of the major language skills using this resource. At the end of the month you may want to create a quiz to test your class on vocabulary and comprehension.

Reading

• Preread with blanks.
• Review any challenging vocabulary.
• Assign further research on the story by having students do an online news search on the topic.

Listening

• Pre-listening: Have students guess what words might fit in the blanks.
• Listen to the audio three times. (First to get the gist. Second to fill in the cloze passages. Third to check answers.)

Speaking

• Put students in pairs and have them practise acting like newscasters.
• Encourage students to use expressive voices when reading news reports out loud.
• Practise pronunciation with any words students are collectively having difficulty with.
• Have a class debate or discussion based on the discussion question.
• After further online news research (see reading ideas), have students share other details they learned about the story. Discuss any conflicting reports.

Writing

• Have students write full sentences (on the board or in a notebook) answering the comprehension questions. Teach students how to paraphrase the information rather than write word for word answers.
• Use student mistakes to teach grammar points.
• Have students write an essay or written response based on the discussion question.

Follow up

• Create a short weekly quiz that tests vocabulary and comprehension of each story as you go.
• Create an end-of-month quiz that tests vocabulary and comprehension from all four stories.

This Week in History »