Do you like stories?

A few podcasts tell stories: one such site is Story Nory, a podcast that features stories from Bertie the frog; among the stories told you can find fairy tales, fables and many more. You can download the story via iTunes or listen to it online. The site features among my favorites "Alice in Wonderland" in installments with a wonderful voice to read it. Cinderella is the all time favorite according to their blog. There are quite a few other story podcasts available; Sometimes I read stories with my students and then have them listen to them or listen to parts of the stories with them.

Story Nory Website

NYT - Most emailed articles

Most emailed articles – this has become quite a popular feature on the Internet. When you read an interesting piece of news or see an interesting cartoon, you may want to share it with a friend. Providers of websites and magazines often include a feature which makes emailing this quite easy. This feature often has names like “Email this article to a friend” and makes it easy to send a news piece to another person, but also gives newspapers a chance to see, where the interests of their readers are.

Find out what NYTimes.com readers are most interested in today. James Barron, a reporter at The New York Times, summarizes the three most e-mailed articles every weekday.

This podcast could be used to have the students write out the article after listening to the podcast and then identify the articles from the online paper. I think it could also be great for summarizing skills.

• Other podcasts from the NYT can be found following this link
• For the most popular articles in writing

Nach Themen suchen bei eslpod.com

ESL Podcast ist, wie der Name bereits sagt, eine Podcast Seite für Englischlernende, die schon recht lange Zeit besteht, dementsprechend groß auch das Angebot an Beiträgen auf der Seite. Bei mehr als 300 Episoden wird das suchen nach älteren im Archiv stehenden Podcasts oft etwas mühsam.
Die Betreiber haben hier eine tolle Suchmöglichkeit eingebaut, so dass mithilfe von sogenannten Tags einfach nach Themengebieten gesucht werden kann. Suche ich z.B. eine Hörübung zum Thema Dining, durchsucht die Suchmaschine alle podcasts die diesen Tag besitzen und ich erhalte übersichtlich in Listenformat eine Reihe von brauchbaren Ergebnissen.
Af diese Art und Weise kann ich zum Beispiel einfach eine Themen-CD erstellen oder mehreren SchülerInnen unterschiedliche Hörverstehensübungen zur Verfügung stellen.


Suchergebnisse zum Thema Dining
Webseite von ESL Podcast

Eslpod.com with enhanced content

The latest eslpod.com Podcast about the Rebook Ad Campaign launch has been redone and now uses an integrated slide show to help students master the new words. An excellent idea. More to follow, hopefully.

English as a Second Language Podcast

It's been around for so long that they have begun charging for their additional services; While the excellent audio material is still available for free, they now charge for their learning guide. Great dialogs followed by an explanation ping pong, which is sometimes quite long, almost too long. Great source of vocabulary. In episode 259 Randy reserves a table at a restaurant. The episode is about 20 minutes long.

Their website is at eslpod.com
Download the episode

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)