The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 115 million people.
Their Special English series features boasts an enormous archive of easy English at a slower than usual speech rate. The archive has a search function and the topics are varied. Broadcasts come with transcripts and the audio files come in different formats. You can also have the stories sent to you by e-mail.
I use their stories frequently in my classrooms; sometimes I add listening comprehension questions; When the recordings are very long, I edit the podcasts with audacity.
Nobel Prize report on Grameen
VOA Home
Breaking News in English has been around for a couple of years and features excellent podcasts from Sean Banville for learners of English as a second language; the news reports are free and there are several new lessons a week; each comes with a resource pack full of exercises and tasks. All lessons are based on stories currently in the news – as the world’s news breaks. The lessons can be downloaded in various formats are graded according to levels.
Breaking News in English
Most emailed articles – this has become quite a popular feature on the Internet. When you read an interesting piece of news or see an interesting cartoon, you may want to share it with a friend. Providers of websites and magazines often include a feature which makes emailing this quite easy. This feature often has names like “Email this article to a friend” and makes it easy to send a news piece to another person, but also gives newspapers a chance to see, where the interests of their readers are.
Find out what NYTimes.com readers are most interested in today. James Barron, a reporter at The New York Times, summarizes the three most e-mailed articles every weekday.
This podcast could be used to have the students write out the article after listening to the podcast and then identify the articles from the online paper. I think it could also be great for summarizing skills.
