Our high quality online English lessons and additional ESL teaching resources provide you with a valuable tool kit. Teach your students about our rapidly changing world and how to communicate more effectively within it with photocopiable lessons from Thomson Reuters news. More information on our time saving lessons.

Cutting news for the classroom

Would you like to involve your English students in a topical discussion? Do you find your ESL students need to develop greater understanding of many world issues to help them develop general language proficiency? Through newspaper articles students can access up-to-date information from countries all around the world. They can learn geographical, historical, social/cultural, economic, and political information using the target language.

Learning through newspapers

Learning through newspaper articles provides learners with an interesting challenge. Many of us, as language practitioners and teachers, recognize this and regularly turn to newspapers and magazines for authentic texts of current interest to enhance our teaching. We scan the paper, find a piece we consider interesting, cut it out and then photocopy it for the class. Often, however, the hoped-for goal of reading and discussing the news article with the class is a disappointment; it can prove to be an unfocussed and relatively unproductive exercise. The material is too long, too discursive, the vocabulary can be off-putting, and in the end, very little discussion is generated. Sadly the text is often abandoned, even though the objective was sound.
Authenticity itself does not assure a valid learning experience. The exploitation of an authentic text requires considered development to achieve direction and focus.

Using Textbooks

Textbooks provide us with a systematic and organised way in which we can focus on teaching English. However, much literature focuses on the potential of topical, authentic text for motivating the students we teach. A piece of text from a newspaper can have an immediate relevance. For this reason many EFL and ESL textbooks try to incorporate newspaper articles. Unfortunately, they are only able to do so when all forms of exophoric reference are removed. Exophoric reference is the background or real world knowledge students, or readers in general, require to understand a text. If a newspaper text is to be incorporated into a textbook in two years time, all references to the event must be explained in full.
Most real world communication requires exophoric referencing so we try to incorporate when we teach. We can only do this by using recently torn out news articles (if we are fortunate enough to have a readily available supply of English-language newspapers and magazines), and this in itself presents another problem. Our students, fellow teachers and employers are accustomed to a high standard of presentation in the materials used in the ESL classroom. Trying to maintain that presentation standard, and general lesson quality in the materials we produce, while working a full teaching load, is more than a little daunting.

This is where English-to-go comes into play; the work has already been done. English-To-Go supplies a variety of ESL teaching resources, the main one being “Instant Lessons” - English lessons based around Thomson Reuters news articles ranging from elementary to advanced. The materials offer reading, writing, listening, grammar and speaking activities and include, vocabulary, language-use, comprehension and post-reading activities such as role plays, discussions and games. Each lesson comes complete with student worksheets, teacher’s notes and follow-on activities. On average, each lesson contains nine different activities based around the news article. For busy teachers, English-To-Go can save hours of preparation time in cutting up news articles and formulating lesson plans. Full membership to English-to-go is not free, although you are able to sign up for the free guest membership to receive one free resource monthly. There are also free sample English lessons: Free sample_lessons