I provide this service weekly on Mondays.

I use Monday's 5.32pm World Business Report on the BBC World Service. Every week I carefully select the most interesting and suitable 10+ minutes of the programme for teaching purposes.

For practical help on recording the programmes, please contact me.

To accompany each programme I produce a variety of exercises at Intermediate Level +. These include the following: Corrections, Questions, True/False and Gap-Fills.

I produce between around five pages of exercises each week containing around 90 items. The exercises are accompanied by five to six pages of comprehensive answers. I also produce three to four pages of transcripts of the in-depth reports and interviews contained in each programme and two pages of useful website links related to the topics in that week’s programme which can be used for follow-up language activities. This makes the materials ideal for either classroom teaching or self-access and directed learning.

I aim to to e-mail institutions the exercises, answersheets and transcripts by 2pm on Tuesdays. (The materials take me around 10 hours to prepare and it is impossible for me to send them earlier without affecting the quality of my writing.)

The BBC World Business Report is ideal for training students already in business or who wish to work in business to improve their listening skills. Each programme contains the latest headlines from the world of business and finance, together with market reports and in-depth reports and interviews. The interviews are often with non-native English speakers which exposes students to the various accents they are likely to encounter in their work. Each interview is accompanied by a transcript which allows students to focus on the pronunciation of the words used in the interview and also gives them the opportunity to learn useful new lexical items from hearing and seeing them in context.

The same vocabulary and grammatical structures are recycled naturally from programme to programme. In addition to exercise items focusing on listening comprehension, I also focus on listening training and include items which train students in dealing with those features of spoken English which they generally find so challenging - the fast speed of delivery, linking, weak forms, assimilation and elision. Where non-native speakers are interviewed I usually gap-fill words which are probably part of the students’ active vocabulary but which they might have problems recognising due to the unfamiliar pronunciation.

To listen to a typical BBC World Business News programme, CLICK HERE

To view the accompanying exercises and answersheets, DOWNLOAD HERE

To view the accompanying transcripts, DOWNLOAD HERE