Breaking News English

This website offers a great selection of activities based on contextual news stories. The activities provided for each of the articles touch on all of the four skills. The teacher can use what is level appropriate and focus on the activities that the teacher feels as the most useful.

This I Believe

While many of these articles are for advanced levels, some of the articles that one can listen to can be used to increase perception. The material is very contextual and offers the students the ability to hear native speakers talk about issues in America. This is important to normalize the culture. The articles all have scripts that can help students who are have a higher reading skill. Many of the articles can also be good discussion points.

English English
This website offers a lot of links to helpful listening activities. Since Japanese students need to have out of the classroom interaction with English, providing links where students can listen to authentic English is important. Also, if the teacher can use some of the listening in class, they can allow the students the time to listen to the articles ahead of class in order for them to feel comfortable with it by class time.

English Voices

This site allows users to record and post comments, but more importantly for this context, it allows the users to listen to audio clips with questions following. The vocabulary used in the clips, as well as key phrases are show in a video that accompanies the audio. This is helpful because it allows the students to have visual aides to the audio which may present a challenge. The audio can be used to as homework, and also as in class activity.

Make Own Comics

On this page is a group of comics that the teacher can print out. This can be an interesting activity because it allows the learners to use the language creatively. A good follow up activity could be to have students read the comics with a partner. This activity offers enough freedom for learners of this age to feel challenged, but is still structured enough where the students will not feel overwhelmed.