Authentic Materials
Some suggestions of authentic materials available on the web.
Use these as homework assignments for your class, or just
as online text and pictures you can
copy, paste and modify
to create your own handouts much more easily than using articles from books or magazines.
Remember: "The web's your oyster"!
- Song lyrics
- Lyrics Connection
- The International Lyrics Server
- Lyrics World is particularly useful for recent stuff.
- Songtext.net has a lot of modern stuff such as hip hop. You have to sign up, but it's free.
- Find lyrics of traditional folk songs, lullabys etc. as well as blues/modern folk at Mudcat
- A list of more places to find lyrics
- Still no luck? Try a search on a search engine like Google for any snippets of the lyrics that you happen to know (don't forget to put quotes at either end of each snippet) e.g. "evening of the day" "I sit and watch as tears go by"
If you don't know any of the lyrics then try with band name, song name and the word "lyrics" e.g. "The Rolling Stones" lyrics "As Tears Go By" but you might have to sift through a lot of home pages until you find what you need.
- Business Education resources in English from Biz/ed. Look at the Business Pages for more links.
- Maps and driving directions in the UK
- Online versions of lots of newspapers can be found at the Internet Public Library reading room. Also try Paperboy for UK papers.
- Tests and quizzes on just about anything you can think of.
- Mystery and Crime pages gives you a new story every week. If you're really into this gruesome stuff, you can use material from the fictional but very realistic crimescene.com
- netLibrary lets you read books online for free. Remember you can copy sections of text and paste them into a word processor to make a handout.
They mostly offer old books so all the classics are there.
- There are also various resources available on CD, such as the Encarta encyclopedia. This allows easy copying and pasting for
creating paper handouts.
- For authentic materials that can only be used online (not suitable for printing) see Computers in the Classroom