As language instructors, we've always tried to expose our students to real-world use of the target language rather than to merely artificial text-book dialogues, exercise, drilling, or whatsoever. In light of this, one of the most commonly used sources of real-world language is news. However, more often than not, instructors experience difficulties finding news that is suitable regarding students' language abilities—mostly reading.
Imagine a teacher coming across a real good news article that is highly conducive to his students; however, he teaches beginning, intermediate, and advanced classes. Now, he is at the decision moment—does he have to rewrite the news three times according to different class levels so as to provide all of them with "comprehensible input"?
With Newsela, the trouble is saved.
Newsela apparently is a news website that offers users up-to-date news around the world with different topics to choose from, just as other news websites do. What makes Newsela different is the text level of all its news that turns reading news more comfortable and enjoyable to all the readers especially including language learners.
Different text levels vary by the words choice, sentence structures, number of words in the article, and even by the title itself. The max level is usually the original news extracted from a press, and several versions are simplified by Newsela staff.
Moreover, Newsela features activity and assignment options so that teachers can invite students to read and complete follow-up exercises. A few quick quiz questions are also available for teachers and learners to check their comprehension of the news article.
Teachers may even create their own online reading classes and come up with assignment by following the instructions and templates offered by Newsela. This is absolutely helpful for teachers to better integrate the materials into the class objectives by providing closely related exercises based on the information in the reading.
In addition to classification by topics, Newsela as a learning-oriented website provides further categories based on sets of a certain topics compiled by the staff. For specific purposes of some classes where instructors aim to use content-language integrated approach, the text sets may help a lot with preparing materials of different levels.
In short, Newsela is a useful news website for both language learners and teachers. In the class, teachers are able to use an article with varying text levels that best fit the target students. Students in the meantime have access to comprehensible authentic English news article outside of textbooks. Personally, I find this website a strongly recommendable tool for teachers to plan their reading class, and also for learners trying to improve their reading skills.
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