[jbyrne]

Depending upon your teaching situation, you may from time to time use newspapers as the basis for a discussion and/or reading class.

My method is to set the reading as homework. The class time is spent going over the more difficult vocab and discussing the issues. I then set a writing homework based upon the discussion points. Hence we end up with a nice 4 skills approach plus vocabulary lesson.

The hardest part is finding an interesting article at the right level. But now I know where to look, a decision can be made in seconds.

http://www.jamaby.com


Here you will find articles updated in some cases hourly, about a wide variety of subjects. The easiest Newspaper articles are graded *** 3 and target mid-intermediate students rising to a **** 4 Upper Intermediate and a ***** 5 Advanced.

Its worth a look and could save you some time and effort.

[emile]

Thanks for the site Jason. The content is useful; the design of the site could be improved, I guess.

You have some kind of software that can rate the level of a piece of text. That's quite interesting. Would you mind telling a little more about it - what language is it written in, how were the wordlists put together, do you use readability stats?

[jbyrne]

Hi

Thanks for your comments about

http://www.jamaby.com

I can`t give away all my secrets I`m afraid But the word list is based upon similar academic research to what Graded Readers and Text books use.

The software and variations on a theme have been written in many languages . The choice of language really depends upon the context. In this case I chose Perl.

Regards

Jason

[livinginkorea]

The site is a great resource. When I taught adults in my first job I didn't have much of an idea so I used to go to Yahoo News and go to the Odd News which had weird stories. I would pick one story for the week (at the time I had three classes, twice a week) and we would do the article for one day. I used to copy the article and then change it around if it was too long or two much slang etc depending on my students level.

It was a lot of work but I got a lot of use out of it because I used it in my other schools and like everything else, the more you try and more you learn.

Having said that my wife has a book from the Hearld I think, which she got in Korea. It has articles and lots of excerises but the book would be for mostly pretty advanced students. If anybody wants to know the name of it I can check it out as it's buried in all the other books!!