Russell Stannard finds a website where listening means business.
It’s funny how you come across websites. I am studying Chinese at the moment and I have found an amazing site called www.chinesepod.com, which I find extremely helpful – I have even signed up to get the extra content which is not available for free. So the thought occurred to me that there must be something similar in English. Well, I was right.
This really is a phenomenal site. It has a massive database of business-oriented listening material which can be downloaded in MP3 format or played directly on the computer. Once you log on, just click on Podcast Archive. To help you choose something that interests you, the material is organised both by topic and by function (click on the tabs to see what is available in each list). Alternatively, you can click on a level from the list at the left-hand side of the screen and see the contents for that level. You can then either play the MP3 recordings straight from the computer or download them. If you use the recordings in class, you will need to listen to the whole thing first so that you can target the parts you want the students to hear. Each recording has a dialogue, but there is generally quite a lot of chat and introductions before you get to the dialogue itself. This introductory material explains the words you are going to hear, the context, etc. The idea is that the podcasts are complete lessons in themselves. I must admit that some of the recordings are not that natural. They tend to be scripted dialogues rather like those you get in some ELT coursebooks. Usually there are two people in a studio reading the dialogues. However, the vocabulary and expressions that come up are really useful (as I have found when using the Chinese site). Here are a couple of ideas I have tried so far with my students.
1. Get the students to listen to a particular podcast for homework. Tell them to listen to it several times and take notes. Explain that they will have to answer some questions about it in the next lesson. In the lesson, put the students into pairs or groups and get them to discuss some questions based on what they have listened to.
I used the following dialogue:
biz_englishpod16_B6_20060626.mp3(16.43mb)
and wrote these questions on the board:
Discussion questions
- Who has a drinking problem?
- What does the woman want to do about the problem?
- What is meant by verbal warning?
- What is meant by the term pros and cons?
- What might be the consequences of doing nothing?
- What did they decide to do?
- Who are they going to call?
I used different kinds of questions to widen the scope of the activity. For example, general comprehension questions (questions 1, 2, 6 and 7), vocabulary work (questions 3 and 4) and inferring (question 5).
2. I hate using technology if it requires too much work on the part of the teacher. I like quick and easy solutions. For example, in another lesson I simply told the students to listen to the podcast for homework and then at the beginning of the lesson I put them into pairs, wrote some key words on the board related to what they had heard and told them to try to remember as much about the dialogue as possible. They had to talk about each word and explain how it related to the podcast. I chose quite a long listening for this. It worked well, though I must admit I hadn’t realised quite how much difficult vocabulary was introduced in the dialogue and my IELTS class actually found it tougher than I anticipated. We ended up going through all the words at the end to make sure the students understood them.
For this exercise, I used the following dialogue:
biz_englishpod36_C9_20060811.mp3(16.50mb)
and wrote up these words:
There is additional material on the site for which you have to pay. (My experience of the Chinese version of the site is that paying for the extras is really worth it.) This includes access to printed versions of the dialogues – very useful if you want to create further materials. An obvious activity would be simply to print out the dialogue, white out some of the key vocabulary, photocopy it and give to the students. For homework, ask the students to listen and complete the dialogue.
The bottom line is that this is great material for the students to use on their own. Each podcast is a complete lesson, and anything that gets students studying and gives them more exposure to vocabulary is a good thing. So often the online material I recommend to my students is bitty and doesn’t really allow them to study autonomously. This site is different: they really can work alone and make good use of all the features. Create some initial interest by doing a few opening activities as a class and you may find that some of your students really take to it.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT and Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He is one of the authors of New Standard English, published by FLTRP China, which has recently been in the press for selling over a million copies. Russell has also worked on Macmillan’s Inside Out series.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 47, 2006
