Hi guys!Today I'm going to talk a little bit about PODCASTS... Do you know what is a podcast? No?!? Don't worry, I realized what was a podcast more or less one week ago. A podcast is an online audio file which you can either listen to in the Internet or download on your PC or MP3 player and use it whenever you want. Podcasts deal with any topic and, serching the Web, you will find out any kind of podcasts related to the topic you are interested in. As far as my language learning is concerned, I think that using podcast is a clear example of how technologies can be used wisely nowadays depending on our specific needs. In this case, we, as students of English, can take advantage of these digital files and, by listening to them, we can have a chance to improve our listening skills, our pronunciation of English and even also our speaking skill. Up to a certain extent, podcasts - but also other Internet facilities - help us to become more indipendent and self-organized students because we can plan our language learning step by step by ourselves and have a chance to personalize our studying also outside the English class. But, obviously, podcasts cannot be a substitute for our daily involvement in speaking English directly and joining conversations in English. Podcast are a wonderful tool but they lack what is essential in a conversation between people, that is INTERACTION. It's true that, downloading the podcasts on your MP3 player or IPod, you can listen to them whenever you want and it's like having an English friend always accompanying us and talking to us. But we have to bear in mind that in this kind of thing there is only one voice speaking - the other one - and our role is basically passive because we just have to try to understand but we don't have to prove that we really understood what we were listening to.
Actually, I spent the last two hours in surfing the net to find out interesting websites that contain podcasts related to English learning and education. I must admit that it was quite hard to find specific websites because the Web offers a large amount of different stuff. In the end, I subscribed to 3 websites: two provide with podcasts in English on a wide range of topics and the other one is specific for people interested in learning and improving Business English. The first one is called China 232 A Fun and Free Way to learn English where you can find podcasts on different topics, serious and funny, to listen to or download. Each podcast is enriched with comments and explanations on the most important sentences or idiomatic expressions. The second website is Better@English where the English podcasts are also collected separatedly depending on your level of English: Intermediate, Upper-intermediate and Advanced. The last one, ESL Business News offers a weekly podcast of international business news read in a clear English and each podcast is accompanied by the script of the audio file.
I think this can be enough for now,
I hope you'll appreciate my suggestions. Let me know something about it!
Elena
