About this website
| This site is designed primarily for those of you whose first language is not English. It will help you learn to read a daily English-language newspaper. Clearly, we hope you will read the Bangkok Post, but there is much on this site to help you read any English language newspaper.
Not only newspapers This site can also be useful to you even if you are not yet a regular newspaper reader. After all, if you can learn to read the Bangkok Post comfortably — without using your dictionary too often — you can be confident that you know enough English to read most other materials intended for native speakers as well.
Thai language too Its is always nice to find something to read in your own language. There are two such sections for our Thai readers. Try Acharn Sunee's tips first, and don't miss our Tuesday translation it column. You might be surprised how many non-Thais use this column to improve their Thai.
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Three kinds of material
Where to get started
Who we are
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| Teachers: We spend most of our time writing educational materials using the newspaper. We have learned much about how to use authentic materials with learners of English in the process. We are happy to be able to share many of these ideas with you on this site. More on this below. |
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Three kinds of material
This site contains three kinds of material:
- fresh material, updated six days a week, consisting of the columns we do for the Bangkok Post in our "Improving Your English with the Bangkok Post" programme, that's our home page. There is also a word of the day for building your useful newspaper vocabulary;
- timeless material, dealing with aspects of the newspaper or of language learning which remain consistent year after year – writing styles, basic newspaper content, reading strategies, vocabulary development, etc.; and
- information on Thailand gathered from our trips around the country for seminars.
Where to get started
This is a very big site, certainly one of the biggest educational sites on the Internet which consists entirely of original content – material we write ourselves or take from our newspaper. Our home page always displays our latest material. Each page also has a "navigation bar" (that column on the left) so you can quickly go to any of the major sections on the site no matter where you are. If you are visiting for the first time, you might want to look at the site map to get oriented.
Regular visitors
Regular visitors usually are most interested in our "Improving your English with the Bangkok Post programme". Each weekday the topic changes. Monday’s reading lesson is based on stories from a variety of feature articles appearing in our Bangkok Post. Tuesday focuses on translating English to Thai. Wednesday helps readers with a current topic in the business news. Thursday focuses on developing news stories. Friday (during the Thai school term) is a complete lesson for classrooms. You'll find our "word of the day" useful, too.
Students
If you are mainly interested in learning to read an English-language newspaper, start with the either the reading tips section or our tips for students. Notice also that we have a huge section on vocabulary building. If you visit this section, spend some time reading the introduction so that you will understand how to use it effectively.
Teachers
There is a lot on this site for teachers. There are numerous teaching suggestions, but there are also dozens of example lessons in post tips covering most of the text types found in the Bangkok Post. These lessons are arranged thematically (e.g. weather reports, news photos, letters to the editor, etc.). Many you can use largely unaltered, other could easily be adapted by substituting examples from local newspapers. To see our latest lessons with links to those we have produced over the past four years click Many of these are "classic lessons" in the sense that you can adapt and update them.
Something different
If you're interested in seeing something of life in Thailand, just click on our Visiting Thailand section.
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Winner
of PANPA Award for Excellence
