I am at elementary school so the topics that this site offered were just a little too mature for my little ones, but I liked a lot of them and had I been working with 11-13 year olds I would have been able to foster some great conversations and writing: http://www.tweentribune.com/content/tweentribune-classroom

When I did teach that age group, I predominately used movies, first my favorite legends and fairy tails, then movies on the topics that they were studying in their regular education classrooms, grade level curriculum. I would pre-teach some of the vocabulary that they would need, and we would stop the movie to check for understanding. Students would do their best to summarize and at first, I had to do a lot of think aloud and write as I spoke, adding the most important or enduring vocabulary. Then I would make a "cloze passage" removing every fifth or sixth word. I would list the missing words at the bottom of the page and they were expected to write the word in their native language (mostly Spanish speakers where I am and one Chinese family that would have to check that themselves, because I don't know Chinese, yet).
We used the same piece of writing to practice speaking and I would teach how a sentence can be made into a number of different questions.

Why did I do that? Because I couldn't find materials 20 years ago that appealed to that age group! They loved playing pictionary and hang-man with the vocabulary. Come to think of it, that was really fun. My older kids might like to do that.