Getting teens to listen, and write, in English

I very much liked one of the many suggestions Usoa Sol made in her talk, Listen up! Getting teens to listen in English, given at the IH Barcelona ELT Conference -- getting kids to write emails from the protagonists of the song.

Usoa suggested Dido's Thank You, though I wonder if it's got a strong enough storyline and whether or not it tells us enough that we can interpret about the characters. Perhaps White Flag might work better, partly because you've got a YouTube videoclip there that appears to add something to the story.

I'm showing my age here, I guess, but one I'd really go for would be Springsteen's Johnny 99 (video above), which has a more powerful, more obvious story in it, I think.

Neat idea -- and so much better and richer than just another gap-filled song. You could then get your teens to respond to each other's mails...

New Learning English site

The BBC's excellent Learning English site has had a makeover.

Among the changes is a new option to download the audio for the Words in the News section, the archives for which go back to 1999. You also have the 190+ episodes of The Flatmates, a section on pronunciation, plus a section for teachers.

It's definitely a site to recommend to your learners (and perhaps suggest that they make it their default home page) but it also has things you could use in class.

VideoJug: a cool alternative to YouTube

Halloween? Kissing? Halo 3 Tips...? The "How to" video is on VideoJug

My colleague Carolyn Edwards has just told me about VideoJug.com. It's not quite YouTube but has stacks of "How to" videos on it.

As a lesson, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of asking your learners before watching "How to" go about a particular task; get them to make notes of the stages involved; then watch and, while watching, get them to tick in their notes which are mentioned in the video -- giving you student-generated, ready-made, photocopy-free listening comprehension questions.

As a follow-up, assuming you have access to a video camera (or video-equipped mobile phones), get them in groups to (first) storyboard a video of their own and (then) film it.

Your films could then be uploaded on to VideoJug or YouTube, and/or embedded on a class blog.

Not so sure the Love&Sex section is somewhere you want to take your (young) learners (like "Creative Kissing" or the hilarious Avoid Trapped Arm Whilst Cuddling In Bed) but with adults there lots of fun stuff there, and in the site's other sections.

Oh, and don't miss the Halloween videos...

Great stuff on YouTube for English teachers

Bruce Springsteen interviewed on the OGWT in 1978

There's a ton of great listening comprehension on YouTube, stuff that's so much more interesting than the things that come on your coursebook CD -- to start with because (especially to kids!) watching a video clip of (say) a song is so much more interesting than a CD...

Getting them to do the work
One of my colleagues suggested having the learners, in pairs, search for a suitable interview with a famous person, and then write listening comprehension questions for another pair. Get them to choose the video -- don't you make the choice.

Doing that means that there is so much more active involvement of the learners, with them wanting to listen, and wanting to listen again. Whether or not they come up with great listening comprehension questions is not important either: what the activity does is make them creators, not merely consumers of content.

Or letting someone else do the work...?
If you prefer someone else to do part of your lesson planning for you, teflclips.com is a site which will interest you.

On yappr.com you have YouTube-like videos conveniently sorted by subject and level of difficulty, many of them with a subtitle option.

In a recent issue of HLT, there were more ideas for exploiting YouTube.

And here's another idea from Nik Peachey's excellent blog...

Horse race dictation

Another idea from teachingenglish.org.uk, which came to me via its RSS feed: a horse race dictation, in which "students try to predict the order of words in a jumbled sentence before listening for the answer" -- the listening requiring the teacher to give them a horse race commentary with the words taking the place of the horses.

I've not actually tried it out, but it sounds like a lot of fun...!

BBC World Service Radio

BBC World Service Radio

One for your learners: BBC World Service Radio, which you can listen to live as well as to featured programs (eg. the "Dollar a Day" series, in the image, above, an excellent one).

Recommend your learners to change the default start page of their browsers to the BBC and recommend them to listen -- every day. How many of them are in jobs in which they do listen to music or the radio on their headphones..?

It's such good practice, if it's regular -- as well as being a great radio station!

>> An alternative: npr.org

Experimental School Gets Rid of Classes, Teachers

The New Country School in Henderson, Minnesota [website], has decided to do away with teachers, says this story on NPR.org, and pupils now "spend most of their day in front of their computers, working on interdisciplinary projects".

They have no classes, working instead on projects they select themselves; no teachers, no school bell, no fixed schedule, no walls and no janitors (the loos they have to clean themselves!)

Would it work...? Would it work with your learners...? What do they think...? Sounds like a discussion that might work...

NPR is also a great site for listening material -- and one you could recommend to your learners.

BBC Learning English

Another one that came to me via my RSS feeds [explanation]. I was going to start looking for a text on which to base a lesson, and there was one about the Edinburgh Festival, sitting there waiting for me, from the BBC's Learning English section.

The section has lots of things you can recommend to your learners (the Words in the News section, for example, for reading and listening practice) and stuff for you too, including lesson plans.

Listening material on the Internet

Looking for listening material? There is some great audio material out there on the Internet...

The BBC World Service is a great site to recommend to students. On this page you get the news (and sports and business) bulletins -- one I recommend my learners to visit every day, something which they can easily get into the habit of doing by making the page the default start page on their browser.

There is also some interesting stuff in the BBC documentary archive and note also the stuff you can download from the BBC.

Another great site for audio is National Public Radio.

A selection of other sites for listening material:

• At StoryCorps you can listen to "extraordinary stories from everyday people".
  
• At Short Story Radio, you have "English language short stories from around the world"
• In the archives at Business Talk Radio, you have stacks of audio files (not just on business), which might be the place to look if you want American English.
  
• On ihes.com, we have a 25-part radio series about language, language teaching and learning
  
• At elllo.org (that's the English Listening Language Lab Online) you have a vast collection of listening files, with questions, tapescripts etc. Elllo also has its own podcast...
  
• Less easy to navigate are the free resources at learnoutload.com, which claims to be the "largest directory of free audio & video learning resources
• For a really weird and wacky selection of downloadable MP3 audio files (with no problems over copyright) go to OneWorld radio.
• At fonetiks.org, you've got practice on minimal pairs (and in a variety of accents!), if you really want it...
  

Real English
If you've ever worried that the stuff that comes with your coursebook doesn't sound authentic, or your students have said they understand you, but not "real" natives in England (or elsewhere), the BBC has another site on "the way we speak around the UK".

An alternative are the English Accents and Dialects on the CollectBritain site, or the University of Kansas has a similar site, with downloadable Mp3 files, if you want international dialects of English.

Listening activities
What do you do with your listening material? The excellent teachingenglish.org site has some suggestions for listening activities.

Project work
At RadioDiaries.org they suggest something that might make a great project: making your own radio diary. They provide lots of tips, apart from anything else.

Note that you could do the same sort of thing as a podcast [ >> what the @%$* is a podcast? ]