Russell Stannard casts around for some more good websites.
A number of people have asked me recently what a podcast is, so I thought I would start by explaining the term and how podcasting came about. The pod part of the word comes from iPod, a huge storage device, originally intended for music files. If you signed up at the iTunes website, you could download an enormous amount of music to an iPod. The iPod then grew in size and a screen was added for video. It became popular not just to download music and films but to subscribe to content from iTunes so that each time that content was updated, it was automatically sent to your iPod. This became known as podcasting. Podcasting quickly grew beyond the domain of iTunes and hundreds of other podcasting services have developed. So, for example, if you subscribe to the BBC news podcasts, each time a fresh news programme is added to the BBC site, it is automatically sent to you. Of course, it doesn’t have to be received on an iPod; you could have it sent to your computer. To receive a podcast you need to do two things. One is to install software on your computer that checks for new content every time you go online and then downloads it or asks you if you want it downloaded. The second is to subscribe to a particular website to receive its content. Various sites where you can subscribe to content will also let you simply download some of the material for free. This is so that you get a taster. However, if you want to receive it as a podcast (ie it is sent to you automatically), then you normally have to subscribe and pay for that service. Usually when you subscribe to one of these services, you get additional material which is not available as a free download. Remember, a podcast doesn’t have to be just a sound file. It could be a video, a movie, lecture notes, chapters of a book, in fact anything digitial. Podcast is definitely the buzz word around the ICT circuit, and because of the millions of podcasts that are now available, the way we can access listening material and video has completely changed. At the moment there are big debates in academic circles about podcasting. Many people think it is a great way to deliver lecture notes, but I am worried that it will make students lazier than ever!
An ELT podcast site
Richard Cain at the British Council in Thailand recommended this site to me:
The site is organised into three levels and all the listening material is free. You can either listen to the material online or download it, and the sound quality is very good. The podcasts are all based around topics. The site organisers have tried really hard to contextualise the language so that, for example, in level one there are interviews, recipes, weather forecasts, etc. A lot of the material deals with different areas of Englishspeaking culture. So in level three there are podcasts on Christmas, Hallowe’en, Down the pub, etc. The Christmas one I listened to was in the form of an interview; the Down the pub podcast was recorded in an actual pub. One of the interesting features of this site is that some of the listening material also has video to support it. Each podcast is also supported by a range of activities, such as related vocabulary tasks, worksheets with answers, and webquests; full transcripts are also provided. However, in order to access the full range of these support materials, you need to be registered (see below) and, of course, pay, though it seems relatively inexpensive. I looked around the site to see what else I could pick up without registering. On the main page, below the links to the level-based material, there is a section called ‘Extra Material’ for all levels. Clicking on this gives you access to a phonemic chart and worksheet. On the main page there are also examples of worksheets if you click on the button ‘Free Sample Worksheets’ on the right-hand side. You get one at each of the three levels along with the accompanying listening material. The worksheets are quite impressive. They include images on the page so they are a little more lively than many of those available online. There is the usual selection of pre-listening activities and then gist- and detailed-listening type tasks to do. The worksheets focus on intonation as well as vocabulary. The answers are provided at the end, so students can work alone. There are also separate vocabulary exercises. The one I looked at was a simple gap-fill exercise based around vocabulary from the podcast.
Registering
To get access to the rest of the material, you will need to register. It costs $15 for three months, so you are getting a lot of material for your money and, of course, more is being added all the time.
Other podcast sites
If you go to this site, you will find podcasts organised in categories and if you click on these, there are subcategories. One of the categories is learning. If you search for ‘Learn English’ or ‘ELT’, you will get a whole list of podcasts that may be useful. There are podcasts about English songs, people talking about how they study, learning vocabulary, etc. I found pages and pages of them!
This Yahoo site is another good starting point. Take a look at the categories on the right-hand side or try the most popular and highly rated ones.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT and Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He is currently working on the Teacher’s Books and CD ROMs for Hello English, published by Balberry.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 50, 2007
