Voice of America, not just American propaganda

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/index.cfm

Voice of America

This is a site that I found a long time ago, but I only just explored it last night in any great detail. This site is a daily news site that is an offshoot of the radio station broadcast into many regions of the world (admittedly as propaganda, but still a good English source). The stories contained would be good for reading for comprehension. With graded English like this, students would have a good handle on most of the content words and be able to read, answer questions, and have group discussions. This website is good because it allows for a decent daily selection of articles on relevant news topics that are written in a version of graded English. Written in the same format as the radio broadcasts, these articles have some length, so they allow for depth of idea, but they also seem to use higher frequency words so as to be understood by a large audience. This seems as though it might be good for an intermediate class to use before transitioning them to non-graded VOA website (the regular English edition).

Another good reason to use this is that the website features the ability to listen to many of the posted stories so there is an added audio component.

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