Breaking News English

This is a good website for students who want to practice listening at home. Level: A2 to B2. Click on the link

Overworked English teachers in city-centre language schools also love the "Breaking News" website. That's because it provides an endless series of lessons to keep a class of students quiet for 40 minutes while the teacher marks their homework and prepares the next lesson.

What's good:

• There are always new lessons, based on current news stories, and there are more than 2,000 archived lessons.
• It's easy to choose a level of English that suits you.
• It's a free website
• You can choose the audio reading speed. This is really helpful for students at all levels from A2 (Pre-Intermediate) up to B2 (Upper Intermediate). Just find an interesting news article, and then click on the "5-speeds" link.
• You can also choose whether to listen to an English or an American accent.
• You can read the text while you listen to the words.
• There are always lots of exercises based on the text. Most of them are classroom exercises where you need a teacher, but some are good for students who are studying alone.

  What's not so good:

  • The voice seems to be computer-generated. However, the quality is quite good.
  • Because the website is mainly for teachers, there is a lot of material of no interest to a person learning English.
  • This isn't a smart, sexy, new generation website with lots of exciting graphics and music. However, that's just cosmetic. The site is not very glamorous, but it does the job.