Monday, April 15, 2013

ESL Pod: Enjoy Your English Acquisition

ESL Pod is a great tool for either teaching or learning English. It provides various resources to improve your English. Unlike most of the Podcasting, the way ESL Pod podcasts is slower, to ensure that every listener can understand the topic when they are listening.  It talks about various aspects about English and the environment behind it,  like the movies, history, culture, food, etc.  They use everyday expressions and phrase and also explaining the meaning and use of these expressions and phrase.  The way they talk can be either a conversation or a monologue. Most of the episodes last about half an hour , at the end they will also discuss some of the questions the listeners asked.  For instance, one of the episodes which is called English Cafe 393 talks about an American movie called The Thriller. This episode first give a brief introduction about this movie as well as the cultural background behind this movie. Then it  explains some key terms one by one in order to let the listeners totally understand the movie. For example, when it talks about The Thriller, it will spell it word by word, t-h-r-i-l-l-er, and then it explains its meaning. In this way, listeners can definitely understand the podcasting.


Definitely I will use ESL Pod in my future teaching. I plan to have a listening session every week. Here I suppose the level of students are intermediate. I will set one hour each week, listening to the ESL Pod together with my students. While listening, we will talks about the expression and phrase talked in the podcasting. Ask the students to sharing their opinions together in group. Since I can download the transcripts from ESL Podcast Blog, I will give them the transcript after class.Then I will ask them to write a self-reflection after watching each episode. I think this can be a great way to improve their listening as well as writing ability. Most of all, it provides a excellent opportunity to let the students know more about the culture background behind the language.

1 comment:

  1. What you envision is a good combination of both listening and writing skill pradtice!

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