Another over the top night of AE Webinar 5. Top notch performance by the young future and seasoned super teachers of KB. The subject was based on using Voice of America (VOA) as a teaching tool in the ESL classroom. VOA is helpful resource providing news stories, TV news, podacasts, photo of the day and grammar activities.
Media is good a learning tool, because it contains actual language in comparison to textbooks which use more academic language. News can be a greater hook to students' interests. It can also spark a conversation that will continue outside of the classroom. It is a great source of new vocab. Another advantage is it keeps students aware of events happening locally, nationally and internationally. Moreover, it promotes critical thinking.
One of the nice feature of the news articles are divided into 3 levels of difficulty. Shorter stories and easier words for beginners and it increases in complexity as you advance in levels. Some of the level 2 articles have a quiz and audio files attached. This make for a great way to practice receptive skills. All the articles furnish new vocab definitions at the bottom of the article. A phenomenal way to increase speaking is by using jigsaw activities for an exercise with the articles.
The TV news is student friendly by including subtitles. You can also prompt conversation by giving students the title of the story and they can predict what the story is about. Another activity is to play the news without sound and let students produce the missing language.
Another merit of all these features are you can create some good group work activities based on the above mentioned resources. Check it out yourself, I've included the link.
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