This service runs every week from Monday to Thursday.

Institutions record the two-minute 10am BBC Radio 4 News either onto a cassette recorder or download it onto a computer. For more information on how to download BBC programmes, please click here

To accompany each programme I produce three levels of listening exercises:

Foundation Level KET/PET, Skills for Life Entry Levels 1 and 2
Preliminary FCE/CAE, Skills for Life Entry Level 3 and Level 1
Higher CAE/CPE, Skills for Life Levels 1 and 2

I use a variety of exercise types: Corrections, Questions, True/False, Gap-Fills and Transformations. The exercises are on rotation so that a class which only has lessons one day a week will be exposed to a variety of exercise types.

Each exercise consists of around 20 items and a comprehensive answer sheet is provided. This makes the materials ideal for busy teachers and also makes them ideal for self-access or directed learning.

I guarantee to e-mail institutions the six pages of exercises and answersheets by 12.30pm the same day. This means that students can use that day’s news in the classroom that very afternoon. The stories can then be followed up in the next day’s newspapers.

The main aim of these intensive listening exercises is on listening training in that wherever possible I focus on phoneme discrimination, assimilation and linking. The news is ideal for this because of the fast speed of delivery. Can the students, for example, distinguish between Shipman/Sheepman in a True/False exercise? Do they realise in a gap-fill that the newsreader means ‘West Midlands’ when the letter –t is not pronounced? Can they work out that the newsreader said ‘intense’ and not ‘in tents’? Often in gap-fills I focus on words which may be unknown to students at that level. This trains the students to think carefully about how a new word is spelled and then to look it up in their dictionaries or ask the teacher for clarification.

A second aim of these exercises is on listening comprehension practice and so my items also focus on the content of the programme.

A third aim of the exercises is to expose students to new language, i.e. useful vocabulary and grammatical structures. The same vocabulary is recycled naturally from bulletin to bulletin and newsreaders often use synonyms within a single news story. In addition certain grammatical structures regularly occur in news bulletins – reported speech, the passive, the past continuous with the simple past, the future simple and future continuous. The news can therefore be used to introduce students to these grammatical structures where their usage is clear from the context.

A final aim is to teach students about life in the UK and world events. Teachers can use items in the news to compare life in the UK with life in the students’ own countries – for example the National Health Service, the British political system, justice, and so on. This can lead to useful discussions in the classroom where students are recycling the vocabulary they have encountered in listening to the news.

Meanwhile, younger students are often woefully unaware of what’s happening in the world and the idea of using the news to encourage them to think about world events is pedagogically sound.

In addition, a number of ESOL teachers use my BBC News listening exercises to help their students prepare for Citizenship.

To listen to a typical BBC Radio 4 News bulletin , CLICK HERE

To view the accompanying three levels of exercises and answersheets, DOWNLOAD HERE