BBC World Business News service  
 

I provide this service weekly on Mondays.

I use the 11.20am World Business News on the BBC World Service.
Institutions have two options. They can either download it onto a computer or I can post them a CD or audio cassette of the programme each Monday. For information about prices, please click here

The programme is available for seven days on the BBC website and you will be sent a link when you sign up for a free trial or become a customer.

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 four and five pages of exercises each week containing 80 to 90 items. The exercises are accompanied by a comprehensive answersheet. I also produce three to four pages of transcripts of the in-depth reports and interviews contained in each programme. This makes the materials ideal for either classroom teaching or self-access and directed learning.

I guarantee 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 News 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 phoneme discrimination and dealing with assimilation, elision and linking. 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 with 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

 
     
  Richard Cauldwell of SpeechInAction shares my enthusiasm for using recordings of real speech:
http://www.speechinaction.com
 

I also work closely with Andy Cowle
of North Star:

  http://www.northstarelt.co.uk