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Presenter
Nazile Aliyeva
English Language Instructor

Yasar University
School of Foreign Languages Prep Class
Address: Şehitler Caddesi 1522 Sok. No:6  35230 Alsancak/
İzmir - Turkey

 Title
Why Not ‘Yahoo’ Your Lessons?
Adapting articles from Yahoo news portal for classroom use  

Abstract
News is all around us, so is Internet. We spend endless time listening to the news on TV, or reading articles from our favourite Internet sites. If access to interesting information is so easy, why not use it in the classroom?

According to CEF, in order to be a competent language user, one must understand and react to authentic texts. In the past, the use of authentic materials may not have been so popular in the teaching world; however, it is now a consensus that the use of authentic materials in the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom is beneficial to the learning process. It can be motivating, since we all like to know what’s going on in the world; educational, since some of the articles give scientific knowledge; and, useful, since genuine samples of language present a variety of grammatical and vocabulary forms.

The article discusses the advantages of using authentic materials in language teaching, presents a selection of authentic texts taken from Yahoo news portal, and focuses on the method of adapting them for classroom use, based on the Task Based Teaching Approach. Sample lesson plans are also included.

Key Words: authentic materials, reading, TBT.