Teacher Discussion Forums

[SpanishSam]

Hi, I'm looking for some podcasting websites that my students can listen to at home to improve their listening skills, can anyone recommend any good (EFL) sites?

Thanks!

[Lorikeet]

It might help if you give the age and level of the students.

[SpanishSam]

Quite a range really from teenagers to adults, and from beginners to upper intermediate. Not young learners and the podcasts don't have to be exam focussed either.

Thanks!

[sparkler]

I was recommended this site: http://www.podcastsinenglish.com and really like it. There are three levels from elementary to upper intermediate and there are loads of support material that goes with each podcast too. It's British English on the whole but there are conversations with people from different nationalities, both native and non native.

[liverpuddlian]

podcastsinenglish is a good site there's loads of supplementary material that go with the podcasts and the conversations are more natural than the ones in course books

[eslweb]

My friend Dave runs Englishmeeting.com He has a lot of resources aimed at Intermediate to advanced level students.

James

P.S. I've got a few bits of listening on my site, but not enough to make it a major resource.

[Macavity]

Hello,
you might want to look in on www.bbc.co.uk

[eslweb]

Sorry if this is stating the really obvious, but just in case you've never heard of the BBC.... There are two very large areas of the BBC site that should be very appealing to English learners:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

And two areas specifically made for learners:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml
And BBC China ELT: http://www.bbc.co.uk/china/learningenglish/

And let's not forget the English site for British kids: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/subjects/english.shtml

James

[Matty]

Yeah, the BBC are a great resource for learning English. A couple of points though:

The Learn English materials are aimed specifically at upper-intermediate to advanced students.

There aren't many podcasts (MP3 files) that you can download - the BBC protect their content very well, through SHTML and a really neat proxy download system that means it's impossible to record.

You could, of course, just record the headphone output but the quality won't be great.

[eslweb]

The BBC Learning English Website does provide some material in MP3 the rest of the material is provided in REAL Audio...

It is certainly NOT impossible to cache those files, you simply need to launch the file in the Real Audio player, go to the clip properties and then download it using something like FlashGet, it can then be played back in REAL Audio without an Internet connection. (It can also be converted to an MP3, but I am fairly sure THAT would violate copyright)

James

[SpanishSam]

The BBC stuff is good but the podcasts are usually far too long. I've started to use the podcastsinenglish.com site - their podcasts are about 4 mins long so I can do them in a lesson and listen a few time (and give them for homework too).

[teacher-simon]

Most of the news sites have podcasting sections where you can download a whole range of news and a current affairs, as well as radio programs. ABC in Australia is one good podcasting site as can be found though Damn English http://www.damn-english.com/?p=254 which also has some mp3 downloads here http://www.damn-english.com/?cat=64 of some Chinese related topics, good for upper-intermediate.

[STCrowley]

Well, the BBC isn't the only place. Don't forget the Voice of America (I don't think they're much more cheesy-propaganda than the BBC is) and they have the Special English section with really carefully pronounce stuff.

I've used some of their stuff on the economy with success.
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/

-Toby