Teachers and Tutors - What do you get with a paid HeadLang Subscription?
Fiona Easton
Co-Founder
As a former language teacher, I know how difficult it can be to find the time to incorporate interesting, up-to-date materials into lessons with older students. With large parts of higher education curriculums around the world requiring students to both recognise vocabulary and form opinions about current affairs, showing students how to read more widely without becoming overwhelmed can also be a challenge.
The features we’ve added to HeadLang are designed to tackle exactly these issues. We’ve done this in three main ways:
- Letting you upload your own articles to the platform, keeping all of your planning in one place
- Ensuring that it is simple to change the difficulty level of the language used in articles, as well as giving you the ability to generate summaries, so that every student can engage with an activity
- Making sure that you can share content with your students easily - even if they don’t have a subscription
Adding the content your students want and need
We believe that using the news to learn a language is powerful because it can be tailored to the learner. You can use news stories that students actually care about, and give them an insight into the culture and society they are learning about. While the articles in the HeadLang Newsstand cover a wide range of topics and themes, every class is different. And so is every curriculum!
With a paid HeadLang subscription, you can add your own articles to the platform and make use of our other features to make them accessible to the students you are teaching. This means that if there are any topics that the HeadLang Newsstand hasn’t covered as much that matter to both your students and your curriculum, you can import additional articles and keep all of your materials in one place.
Tailoring the content to the learner
Depending on the news topics you think your students will be interested in, the language used in articles can be more technical or complicated. This isn’t suitable for every student, and while we believe that interest in a topic results in a more fun language learning experience, we also recognise that learning languages is a process. To help increase the accessibility of the news as a language learning tool, we’ve built a feature that lets you change the difficulty level of the articles you’ve uploaded.
By changing the difficulty level of an article, you can build students’ confidence gradually by starting with a Basic version of an article to get used to the topic and vocabulary, before tackling the original together. If you have a mixed ability class, or a class with native speakers, you could even print out different versions of the same article to be used by different students. This means that you can still teach from the same article, but with everyone taking it at their own pace.
Shorter activities are great too
If you don’t have time to use a full article as part of a lesson, you can also generate an article summary in a couple of clicks. These summaries are a great way to get a shorter text to work with, while still offering students the benefits of using the news to learn.
And it’s not just for you!
All articles on the HeadLang platform, including ones you have added to your own My Newsstand area can be bookmarked and shared via a link with anyone - even if they don’t have a subscription. This lets you create the content you need and share it with your classes. No hidden fees.
While you might not want to advertise a paid subscription to your students, encouraging them to sign up for a free HeadLang subscription means that you know they will be able to access a variety of handpicked articles in the HeadLang Newsstand to help them with their independent reading. With self-motivation being one of the key ingredients for success when it comes to learning languages (or anything, for that matter!), encouraging students to engage with the articles on HeadLang sets them up for success and builds habits that will stick with them for years to come!
If you’d like to learn more about these features, head to the landing page here. For any other questions please get in touch at support@headlang.com.