Mind the (Learning) Gap - relevant materials for teens in EFL classrooms

We have been so busy at Luna over the last year or so exploiting the wonderful resources that are Mary Glasgow magazines, that we have completely forgotten to write about them!

Published by Scholastic, and available for learners across 5 carefully graded (CEFR) levels from A2 to C1 (Cambridge YLE Flyers/KET for Schools to Cambridge Advanced) and in five editions per year, the challenge is really upon learner & teacher to motor through all the amazing content quickly enough!

Please change here for Tower Bridge!

We promise to keep you better informed of our experiences this year - we already had the third of five editions for 2016-17 land on our doorstep though!

A theme with the Crown (CEFR B1 level) magazine this year (the publisher's "year" sticks to the British school calendar which runs October to September) is a double page spread per issue on one of London's Underground Lines. So far, we have run the rule along the Central & Circle Lines. I think this is a fabulous idea - and extremely well set out - with highlights and photos of the best places to go sightseeing & which station is closest...historical & cultural information too. Also very practical - London IS the world's most visited tourist destination after all, and the map is an iconically simple representation of a very messy bowl of spaghetti!

A lot of Japanese learners can relate to major underground networks - more people pour through Shinjuku station (in Tokyo), for example, than the entire population New Zealand. Per day! And a lot of internationalised students, or returnees if you like, have tackled an underground network somewhere along the way. How often do you struggle to find relevant (and current) material for travelled & more fluent/capable kids if you are running a school/teaching outside eg the Circle Line?

We've had a redundant board game in the cupboard for yonks, which is a great game but impossible to give any relevance to apart from the odd "I'm going to London next month" panic scenario! Now? most popular game in the building as our pre & young teens want to roam around London checking out the sights and transfer urgently to get Hamley's, see Big Ben and get to Wembley Stadium!

As we adopted these magazines to replace our reliance on Oxford University Press's Story Tree (you fools, brilliant YLE resource for EFL chopped off at the knees) we went to bat making resources to cover the entire glossary for each article in each of the five magazines on Quizlet. This allows us to flip our classrooms - teachers get early editions as institutional subscribers & we roll-out sets (per article) well in advance. The subscription deal with Scholastic is SO attractive, and the resources available online so staggeringly comprehensive & archived, we feel the very least we can do is share.

• The Central Line (Crown Sept/Oct 2016)
• The Elizabeth Line (Crown Jan/Feb 2017)