Does your school have one of those newspaper databases, such as Electric Library? You can search for key terms and it returns all sorts of useful newspaper articles.
For example, when you study jargon, you would search for it in newspapers/newspaper database, and it would return up-to-date articles that you can get great examples and quotes from. For example, you could find jargon used in the economic crisis.
In the exam essay, teachers advise against using examples from textbooks, because everyone is using those and the assessors like to be impressed. So examples and quotes from 2008-9 newspaper articles will be useful.
Apart from articles, some advertisements could be useful, as they may have euphemistic or dysphemistic language which you can talk about.
We also analysed various pages from novels to find examples of patterning (Unit 4) and whatnot.