Breaking News English
Listening is one of the core skills in
learning English language. If the activities are designed properly, listening
somehow can be connected to some other fundamental skills of language such as
reading, speaking and writing. Thus, designing interesting yet meaningful
listening activities is significant in order to encourage the students to take
interest and get engaged in the listening activities. Thus, Breaking News
English can be one of the practical yet interesting tools in teaching
listening.
Breaking News English is a tool that gives practices
to students to learning English through listening. Students can listen to current
events and affairs topic around the world such as sports, business, entertainment,
technology and science. By using this tool,
teacher can choose the level of exercise to suits the students’ level as it
consists of easy to hard level of lessons.
How it can be used in classroom?
Pre listening
Teacher activates students’ background knowledge about
the topic such as “Earthquake”.Teacher let the students listen to the tape
recording about the news once.
While listening
Teacher asks students to work in pairs to work on the
exercise which requires students to fill in the blanks with appropriate
answers. There are some other ways to do while listening activities:
Post listening
Teacher replays the recording and let the students
listen once again. Students then can add up their undiscovered words.
Pros
1. This lesson is free!
2. While learning English, students can also increase
their general knowledge of world current issues.
3. Improve listening skill. Listening to the tape prior
to actual task requires students’ full concentration so that they could answer
the questions in the following tasks.
4. Not only the students can enhance their listening
skills, they can also increase their vocabulary banks and improve grammar
aspects.
5. It gives students training on how to get
the gist of a text which through looking at keywords .It contains “Sentence
jumble” where students are exposed to a wide range of vocabulary and different
kind of word order. It gives students practices in the future when they
encounter new text.
Cons
1. Lessons using Breaking News English are
somehow website-dependant and undoubtedly, they need internet connection to
make them happen. Without computer and internet access, the lessons will not
come true!
2. Cheating. Students may directly answer the
questions while listening to the recording.
3.If the task requires students to work in
pairs, there may be some possibility for the students to speak in their mother
tongue. Working in pairs and a lack of teacher’s monitoring could resort the
students to use mother tongue.
In conclusion, intervention in the middle
of the lesson is essential in order to check language usage in terms of grammar, spelling and pronunciation.