These sites have short articles written with relatively simple grammar and vocabulary Orange news Simple news website, check the “quirkies” section for some funny and strange articles. USA Today Very simple American newspaper.

The Guardian is an excellent newspaper which is written at a high level.  They also publish classroom material with reading and vocabulary activites for beginning and advanced students.  Perfect if you want to do some practice exercises after reading, and they have an extremely wide range of topics to choose from.

The English Blog is a great place to browse lots of news stories and videos with notes from an English teacher.  He updates the site daily with relevant stories and interesting cartoons and videos that show real English in context.  There really is a huge amount of material here (search the categories) as well as a lot of links to webistes for English Language Learners (ELL) and podcasts.

Sometimes it’s difficult to really understand the exact sense of a word without seeing it in context.  For example, the words chance, opportunity and possibility.  They all have quite similar meanings but they all have particular situations in which they can be used.  If you visit the British National Corpus and type the words into the search box separately, the corpus will show you 50 examples of that particular word or phrase from a range of...