Tailoring the News to all Learners - Changing Difficulty Levels and Generating Summaries on HeadLang
Fiona Easton
Co-Founder
At HeadLang, we know that not every person accessing the platform is going to be at same stage of their language learning journey. While HeadLang doesn’t cater to complete beginners, we wanted to ensure that the content on the platform is accessible to a range of levels. Whether you are still in formal education, self-taught, or returning to a language learning after a long hiatus, we want to ensure that you can access stories that interest you, rather than having to follow online courses more catered to children or complete beginners.
To make sure that every article meets our learners’ needs, we’ve introduced a simple but powerful feature: the ability to adjust the difficulty level of articles, as well as generate summaries.
How does this work in practice?
With our paid subscription, as well as accessing the original versions of engaging news stories, you can switch between two levels for any article (including the ones you have added to your own My Newsstand area!):
Basic (A1-A2): Perfect for lower-intermediate learners, or people who have taken a long break from learning languages who are just starting out and need content that is simplified and easier to understand.
Intermediate (B1-B2): Designed for intermediate learners, this level offers more complex vocabulary and structures while still being accessible. It’s worth noting that as the language in some news stories are pitched at around the B2 level, this won’t always be necessary and is most useful for simplifying longer form, highly articulate news stories.
How to change the difficulty level of an article:
1. Select an Article: After logging in to your HeadLang account, browse through the HeadLang Newsstand and choose an article that interests you or fits your lesson plan (or import your own to the My Newsstand area!).
This is the original version of an article that we added recently, you can access it here.
2. Choose the Difficulty Level: Once you've selected an article, you'll find an option to generate either the Basic or Intermediate version. Simply click on your desired level and the article will automatically adjust to match the proficiency of your learners.
To see the Basic version of this article click here. For Intermediate, click here.
And what about summaries?
If you’re looking to tackle a shorter text, or if you have less time to read a full article, then you can easily generate summaries of any article on HeadLang. Using the same dropdown, you’ll see the final option is Summary. The results will give you a great overview of the article in relatively simple language.
To see the Summary of this article click here.
And remember!
You can use all three of these features with articles that you upload to your My Newsstand area. Gain access to your custom uploaded content with a paid subscription, to find out more about how to make the most of it, take a look at this blog post.
If you’d like to explore these features for yourself, sign up now! You can cancel any time, sign up here.