Traditional end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year
Just as I finished working on this, a thought crossed my mind: perhaps it should have been an end-of-decade news quiz this time? Ah well... Anyhow, in keeping with the tradition, here's an end-of-year quiz based on the hottest news stories of the past year.
It's a usual mix of politics, sports and entertainment - but no mention of Brexit whatsoever!
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 wish to adapt them.
Some questions are adapted from News Quiz: 2019 in review in The New York Times
The Intermediate level quiz has been checked using English Vocabulary Profile (EVP) and VocabProfiler on LexTutor. The majority of the words in the quiz (93%) are K1 and K2 words, i.e. in the top 2000 most frequent words in English. There are only 29 words (tokens) that fall outside the K1-K2 frequency bands, for example: bankrupt (K4 according to VocabProfiler / C1 according to EVP), prestigious (K4 / C1), clash (K4 / C2), dispute (K3 / C2). The usual disclaimer applies: neither of the above tools takes into account lexical chunks, such as a force to be reckoned with (Advanced) and opened fire (Intermediate), set foot (both versions), whose meaning is opaque.
Scroll down to see the accompanying 10-page teachers' guide full of ideas on how to use the quiz in class and exploit the language.
As usual, in a few days I will be posting follow-up activities for language review.
Happy New Year!
or download as Word doc
 |
| Photo by Katherine Cheng [CC BY-ND 2.0] via Flickr |
Just as I finished working on this, a thought crossed my mind: perhaps it should have been an end-of-decade news quiz this time? Ah well... Anyhow, in keeping with the tradition, here's an end-of-year quiz based on the hottest news stories of the past year.
It's a usual mix of politics, sports and entertainment - but no mention of Brexit whatsoever!
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 wish to adapt them.
Some questions are adapted from News Quiz: 2019 in review in The New York Times
The Intermediate level quiz has been checked using English Vocabulary Profile (EVP) and VocabProfiler on LexTutor. The majority of the words in the quiz (93%) are K1 and K2 words, i.e. in the top 2000 most frequent words in English. There are only 29 words (tokens) that fall outside the K1-K2 frequency bands, for example: bankrupt (K4 according to VocabProfiler / C1 according to EVP), prestigious (K4 / C1), clash (K4 / C2), dispute (K3 / C2). The usual disclaimer applies: neither of the above tools takes into account lexical chunks, such as a force to be reckoned with (Advanced) and opened fire (Intermediate), set foot (both versions), whose meaning is opaque.
Scroll down to see the accompanying 10-page teachers' guide full of ideas on how to use the quiz in class and exploit the language.
As usual, in a few days I will be posting follow-up activities for language review.
UPDATE (5 January 2020): click HERE for follow up activities
Happy New Year!
Advanced level with answers
or download as Word doc
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