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. Below you will find ideas on how to use this resource as a whole-language tool. 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

If you’re looking for regular filler, try focuing on one story each week instead of doing the whole page at once.  At the end of the month quiz your class on vocabulary and comprehension and have a group discussion about any change of events. You can also visit the top stories of each year (from 2006) in the Year in Review section.

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.
• 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.
• Discuss any events that have changed in relation to the stories