Why News is So Important for English Learners

News is a great way to read something interesting that will help your English. Reading phrases from courses and books can be helpful but it can also be quite boring. Keeping up to date with world news will help keep your mind engaged while you are also learning.

The news is a great thing to talk about and it is a great thing to practice talking English with. A good news topic can be perfect for people learning English to talk about together in English. If you are living in an English speaking country or working with English speaking people a news topic is a brilliant way to start a conversation and get some practice in.

Knowing what is going on in the world is very important. It is also very useful to be aware of news stories that affect the country you may be working or studying in. it can help you talk with friends, understand different cultures and it is also very useful if you are going for job interviews in English. Being able to discuss some basic news items in English can really make a great impression at an interview.

English learning experts all agree that news is a great way to learn and understand real and authentic terms and phrases. News is a great place to hear how native speakers really talk and it’s a great place to learn some of the differences and important language skills you may not learn using more traditional methods.

Even though the news is very useful and a great way to learn and practice English, we know it is not always easy. A lot of news websites have large articles with 1000s of words and this can be very hard to work through as an English learner. Even watching videos of news can be complicated if people speak very fast. But it is worth the effort and there are lots of different news outlets that have smaller articles that are easier to understand.

The important things to remember are:

• Read as much news as you can but make sure you take time to try to understand it
• Make a list of words that you do not understand, look them up, learn them and then re-read the news article
• Find a friend or someone at work who will talk about the news article with you. You could even send the article to a friend online and have a video or phone call to talk about it in English to practice.
• Pick subjects and topics you find interesting or that are very important. Trying to learn from things you find boring will not be as useful or easy as something you are interested in.

We have launched a new news service for English learners called News Flash. This fantastic new service provides news straight from Reuters who are one of the largest news agencies in the world. News Flash not only gives you simple, interesting and useful stories to read about and learn from it also includes a vocabulary test so you can actually score your learning while catching up on important news stories.