News Quiz 2018

gilets jaune drapeau bbr sur les champs elysees nov 2018

Photo by KRIS AUS67 on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Although I haven't been a very active blogger this year - but check my posts on the CUP blog - the traditional end-of-year news quiz is here as always! Focusing on key news stories from 2018 I tried to keep a balance between politics, showbiz and sports. And as usual, it's packed with lots of lexical chunks and other vocabulary items for your students to explore.

The quiz is available in two levels:

- Intermediate (B1+/B2-) including a multiple choice version

- Advanced (B2/C1 or higher)

Both versions can be downloaded in Word format if you want to adapt them.

The Intermediate level quiz has been rigorously checked using English Vocabulary Profile and VocabProfiler on LexTutor. The former helped ascertain that the quiz includes vocabulary appropriate for the B1-B2 levels (on the CEFR scale) and the latter that the majority of the words (96%) are in the top 3000 most frequent words in English (K1-K3). There are only 11 words (tokens) that fall outside the K1-K3 frequency bands. Nine words are in the K4 band (3001-4000), such as deteriorate and erupt - it is estimated that B2 level students should know 4000 words. And only two words are beyond the K4 band: icon (K5) and marijuana (K7), which, being cognates, will be familiar to speakers of most European languages.

An important caveat: the above mentioned tools supply data concerning individual words, not lexical chunks of which there are many in both versions of the quiz, for example in high spirits and came out in force.

The quiz is accompanied by a 10-page teachers' guide (scroll down) filled with ideas on how to use it in class and exploit the language from the quiz.

As usual, follow-up activities for vocabulary review and practice will be posted in a few days. Check back in the New Year.

UPDATE: Click HERE for vocabulary review activities

Happy New Year!

Advanced level with answers

or download as Word doc

Intermediate level with answers (+ Multiple choice version)

or download as Word doc

Teachers' notes

UPDATE (2.01.2019) !

News Quiz with highlighted lexical chunks (advanced)

Adjective + Noun / Noun + Noun collocations

Collocations with Verbs

Other chunks

Comments

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