Thursday, October 22, 2009

Focusing on Listening Activities

In this post I provide you with a few places where you can find some listening materials that may be useful for adult learners of ESL. For the most part, I selected websites that have materials that are directed toward adult learners or at least are appropriate for adult learners. Because my target learners are already in the United States and are trying to learn American English, I focus on finding sites that have the sounds of American English.

Voices of America

This is a solid, no-nonsense resource for instructors wanting to provide interesting input for ELL's that they can listen to either in the classroom or on their own. The audio clips tend to be around ten minutes long and contain stories either from American culture (the story of Paul Bunyan, for example), history or are simply entertaining. The speech in the recordings is modified for ELL's--it is slower and clearer than natural speech, but should be approachable because of these factors. Prelistening and postlistening activities should prove easy for the instructor to create, since the stories are rather thought-provoking. If you want to get your students talking, this might be a good place to turn!


Shaggy Dog Stories for ESL Learners
This website has several short stories recordings that the advanced ESL may find entertaining. While the website does not have some of the extra flair that some others do--no prelistening or postlistening activities--the stories are short and can easily keep the interest of the listener. One drawback is that the speech in these recordings may not be entirely natural and informal. However, the accent is accurate, and by listening to these stories, learners can hear the ways Americans pronounce a wide variety of words. In addition, these stories are ones that native speakers would be happy to listen to--they are not "watered down" for ELL's. These stories also have a wonderful potential for springboarding into discussion. Instructors can ask questions that stimulate learners' thoughts by applying some underlying concepts to the learners. The stories would be useful to ESL instructors for playing in class and then discussing; or, if the students have internet access, for extra outside-the-classroom listening practice.

NPR--All Things Considered

If your learners are fairly advanced and are really ready for completely authentic listening material, here's a great place to send them. Following the link I provided, they can go straight to a plethora of listening materials. One of the wonderful things is, your learners can choose their area of interest, and listen to something they'd really like to know more about. Want to engage your learners in meaningful discussions? Or want to help them understand more of the culture around them (perhaps lessening some social distance they may feel?)? For all of these purposes, NPR is a terrific resource. If you'd like to get into health topics with them, head to the Health section, if you'd like to talk about the economy, they can go to the Economics section. What about books--and hearing authors read from and discuss their books? There's a section for that too! These topics will interest the listeners and provide great content for discussions.


ESL Lab
This is a terrific website to give to students to use on their own, especially if some of your students are independent learners. The website has recordings appropriate for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners and the topics cover a wide variety of topics. The website's creator, Randall, seems to work hard at supplying the learners with audio clips that are relevant to daily life activities. Learners can listen to a clip of a man leaving a voicemail message, a man going to a barber shop for a haircut, a young woman talking with a man about a babysitting job, or many more. A great feature of this website is that it provides prelistening and postlistening activities to go along with the audio clips. After taking the postlistening quizzes listeners can get immediate feedback on how well they are answering comprehension questions.

The Moth

Like NPR, this website offers very authentic material that is geared to an average native listener. If your students are pretty advanced and want a place to go that is more than just special, "sanitized" speech or fabricated conversations, this website has some great material to offer. Americans tell stories, the stories are recorded, and here you listen to them. The stories are about fifteen minutes long, are unscripted, and have to do with real life experiences. These are great recordings for in or outside the classroom use.

2 comments:

  1. I see we share some of the same sites. I love manythings.org, but I was listening to the Moth, great stuff. It appears to be focused to higher leveled learners, but it can be used even for beginners if you have done some preteaching.

    Another good site, I think, is http://a4esl.org/
    there all kinds of good exercises, they are leveled and catagoried.

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  2. Kristen, I LOVE the Shaggy Dog Stories. I like the fact that they support pronunciation with a link to the IPA, that they don't provide text in order to keep the focus on listening, and that the stories are short enough and read slowly enough that they are comprehensible -- even to intermediate-level ELLs. Finally, it gives the satisfaction of "getting" a joke in L2. Oh, that wasn't final. The links to other resources lead to interesting articles and advice for learning a language. I specially like the one about language learning myths. Thanks for sharing this one!

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