Job Discussion Forums

gregmcd101 · Joined: 06 Jun 2006 Posts: 144 Location: Ireland (for now)

Especially business english related?

sharpe88 · Joined: 21 Oct 2008 Posts: 226

BBC, VOA, The Economist (is good but needs a subscription)

sui jin · Joined: 08 Feb 2008 Posts: 184 Location: near the yangtze

try the British Council's englishonline.org.cn
and businessenglishpod.com

mat chen · Joined: 01 Nov 2009 Posts: 494 Location: xiangtan hunan

I have found for teaching students the best words in business English to be Richard Nixson's White House tapes. The students learn how business people really talk. No prissy talk here. The big shots call it like it is.

The Great Wall of Whiner · Joined: 29 Jan 2003 Posts: 4946 Location: Blabbing

Chris_Crossley · Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 8:11 am Post subject: BBC podcasts

I use BBC podcasts, which are downloadable as mp3 files from http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/. There are about 250 podcasts available from a wide variety of BBC Radio stations, including some in foreign languages, such as (Mandarin) Chinese, Turkish and Arabic.

The ones from Radio 4 and the BBC World Service are, I find, the best ones for exposing learners to "standard" British English since there are usually no problems with very strong accents from around the United Kingdom. However, I have also used podcasts from BBC Radio Scotland - it drives my students crazy trying to understand people speaking with Glasgow accents!

My defence for using even these is that they allegedly want to study for a master's degrees at a university in the UK (indeed, this is a prerequisite for entry into the pre-bachelor's and pre-master's programmes on offer at the training centre in China that I work for), and so they just have to get themselves attuned to listening to authentic accents used by real people talking about real situations, not scripted recorded stuff read out by professional voice-actors like one can get in IELTS and TOEFL materials!