Learn a song podcast

This is quite a funny podcast from Charles Kelly. You can download or listen to a popular song and (on some) read along while the song is playing. We tried the song "I'm a little teapot" in class and I had the students sing along. One of the students remarked that the song was featured in a Simpsons show, and that the Simpsons moved along funnily to the lyrics. Having the students mime the songs would be another way of using this specific song and a great warm-up for a tired class.

Learn a song podcast

Englishcaster.com

A good place to find ESL related podcasts. Both for students and educators.

Englishcaster is for both students and educators: EFL, ESL, TESOL, TEFL. You can listen to, rate, review and submit podcasts, as well as other English study resources.

Englishcaster

English Idioms and Slang

Nice short blog entries about one idiom and a review of the latest ones. I use these when doing a bit on phrasal verbs or idioms as an opener, since they are so beautifully short.

English Idioms and slang: wash one's hands of Vorlage f

English feed: Present perfect simple or continuous

This podcast focuses on the use of the present perfect and present perfect continuous. It also compares and contrasts the two tenses as well as comparing and contrasting the present perfect and the simple past. I use this podcast to have students review the present perfect. I give them a grid where they can fill in the uses of the present perfect continuous and the present perfect continuous as well as quote examples. Students also fill rules for the use of since and for.

• Rules revised (sort of a script)
  

Clothes shopping with my wife

The extensive ESL podcast by Jeff McQuillan usually starts out with a slow version of a dialog or a story about a topic. In this case it is clothes shopping. Then the host explains vocabulary and phrases. The ending is usually the same sequence at native speaker speech rate. While the whole podcast is rather long, the dialogs or narratives are usually only a minute and a half. What I do with these is that I play the native speaker bit to better students and the slower one to students, who are not so advanced. This works quite well and lets you differentiate in a group with mixed ability students. The script highlights difficult parts of speech. What I like to do to make work easier, is that I cut out the slow and the fast sequence in audacity and save them as a separate listening.

ESL podcast home
Clothes shopping with my wife (script and download link)

How Sigmund Freud Changed What People Thought of the Mind

The Voice of America podcast about Sigmund Freud came out at the man's 150th birthday. It is about the father of psychoanaalysis and his work; I find it quite interesting and it could be used when speaking about well being or when teaching English across the curriculum; in a science class.

• Sigmund Freud script
  
• download podcast