In order to learn about how to use Lexis-Nexis, you should look at the users' guide or get advice from the staff members where you are using it. On Nexis, the sources are organized according to type of source and also according to region. In the manual, you can find information about how to narrow your search to get more documents that are more closely related to your interests, and also on the display formats, that is, how much of the document you will see.
The cost of Lexis-Nexis depends on the services you use, how often you use them, how many people at the site have access, etc. The cost is from approximately $1200 per year.
Using Lexis-Nexis, you can search newspaper articles from newspapers including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, Fortune, and The Economist; wire services; and transcripts of news programs from CNN, BBC, ABC, etc.
In some cases, it is possible to obtain newspaper and magazine articles or TV news scripts from the Internet. We have an extensive list at Mass Media (News Sources) (http://ilc2.doshisha.ac.jp/users/kkitao/online/www/referenc.htm#mass). However, not all of them are searchable, and some do not have back issues available. Also, availability of transcripts of TV news programs is limited.
There are many ways to use this database creatively to teach English. If you want to use videotaped television news programs for your classes, you can use Lexis-Nexis to find transcripts. You can find various news articles on the same topic, compare how the same news story is treated in different newspapers, by television news as opposed to the print media, in different countries, etc. In the case of a dispute between countries, it is interesting to see how news reports in the two different countries treat the dispute differently. If you have a concordance program, you can use the articles and transcripts as a corpus to find and teach frequently used vocabulary or expressions in certain types of news articles. If you are teaching writing news articles, you can pick out those frequent words, and students can search for them to find out how they are used in different contexts.
This database is also useful for research, if you are interested in doing text analyses of newspaper articles or news broadcasts. There are some books on frequently used words, expressions, etc., in the unique vocabulary in news articles. Using this database, you can find many examples, and it is easy to analyze them statistically. You can also gather materials from Nexis to do discourse analyses of broadcasts or articles.
This database also has legal documents.
If you find any problems, let me know.