Russell Stannard wonders if he has found the second best listening site on the internet for English language students.
If someone were to ask me what my favourite ELT website is for learning English I think I would say that it was www.breakingnewsEnglish.com. This site has a fresh news article every couple of days, along with a sound recording of the article and then a mass of worksheets that teachers can use in class or students can work with alone. My students love the site and I am still amazed at the work that goes into it. However, I now have a second favourite listening site …
www.elllo.org/english/home.htm
I don’t think I have ever found so much free, well-produced and clearly-organised content on one site. There is so much to write about that I am going to break it up into sections.
Interviews
If you click on the Interviews button at the top, you will come across a page which offers listening material divided into five versions. Each version has interviews and discussions to listen to and transcripts to read, but some also have quizzes, additional exercises, etc. To the left of the five version icons you will see the numbers of the interviews available in each particular version. Just click on the numbers and the choices will appear on the screen. For example, choose number 900 from Version 5. This is a discussion between Paul and Katia on lending money to friends. You can simply listen and follow the text, but if you click on Printable Lesson to the right, you can also download and print out some exercises (great both for teachers to use in class or for students to use at home), and if you right-click on the MP3 links (also on the right-hand side), then you can download the listening file. You can also click on Audio Notes to get explanations of the grammar and vocabulary in the dialogue. Again, if you right-click, you can also download these. That is not all, though. Click on Audio Slide Quiz and the same audio is turned into an interactive quiz, where you listen to snippets and then answer questions.
Videos
Now go back to the home page and click on the video index. This gives you access to a whole host of videos in which people talk about various topics. You can print out the transcripts, and there are normally short quizzes students can do to check their comprehension. This is great for students to work on alone so that they can get some extra listening practice.
Games
So, with over 900 interviews and all the video material, you might think that that was it. In fact, this is only the start. There is also a whole section on listening games. These are pretty simple, usually just involving clicking on pictures, etc, but they are easy to use, completely free and very well organised. Again, you can access the transcripts.
Even more…
It goes on and on. There is practice material for the TOEFL exams (click on STeP). There is a news section, which turns recent news reports into listening activities. There are other sections to explore, such as Situations, Mixer, Talking Points and even Songs, and each section has loads of material. With the Songs section, for example, you can listen and follow the lyrics at the same time. I could go on and on …
Training video for Elllo
I have created a training video (http://trainingvideos.hscs. wmin.ac.uk/greatListening/index.html) to take you through all the different sections. Be patient if it takes a while to download: it will really help you to get the best out of this site.
Continuing with the theme of listening, but offering something very different, this site provides a fantastic dictation tool which is ideal for independent study. Students can listen to stories (many are news stories at different levels of difficulty), and then listen to the same story broken down into parts. They then try to write out what they hear. The software automatically checks if they are correct or not. The great thing is that it will repeat the same part as many times as a student needs and it won’t get bored or angry! Once one part has been completed successfully, it moves on to the next. When you open the site, just click on one of the stories. It will immediately start loading ready for you to listen. You can listen to it first to get the context and then, below, you will see the same story in segments. Just click, and the first segment will be read out for you to type in the space provided. If you find the dictation too difficult, there is plenty of help. There are two hint buttons, one that gives you the first letter of the next word, and one that gives you the whole word. You can also choose to work through the dictation as either sentences or words. Choosing words is much easier as it is rather like a gap-fill activity and you don’t have to do the full dictation. If you sign up to the site, you will be given a detailed breakdown of your score and performance. This is a great tool to show to your students, who can easily use it at home. I really recommend that you give it a try. Again, I have created a series of training videos to help you.
Training video for Listen and write
Go to http://trainingvideos.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/listenWrite/index.html for a series of videos that will take you through the site and show you how it works.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK, where he teaches using technology on multimedia and TESOL courses. He also runs www.teachertrainingvideos.com, a website that trains English teachers to use technology. He has just won a Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for this website.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 60, 2009
