Report Length
Using reports longer than 3-4 minutes is inadvisable with lower level students. In fact longer reports are also frustrating for higher level students. The problem seems to be that students concentrate a great deal on news reports because of the information density and speed. This seems to take a great deal of mental energy and they can't seem to keep this up for more than a few minutes. Students do become frustrated when they can't understand all the main ideas but there are several ways to deal with this.