Hello everybody! How are you all?
Well, this week we have learnt what podcasts are (this was actually quite a new word for me) and I must say “e-tivity 6” was the one I liked the most so far. Last year we did a lot of writing exercises so now I am happy to have the possibility to focus more on my listening skills; that is why I usually try to jump at every chance I get to listen to stuff in English… And podcasts are really helpful in this sense :-)
Anyway, it was not easy to find interesting material; it took me a little bit of time to choose three good links it was worth sharing with you… I hope you will enjoy them ;-)
- Business English Pod -Job interview
This podcast is taken from a very well-structured website about business English. There you can find grammar tips, vocabulary exercises and most of all podcasts about different situations you normally have to deal with when you work. So the files are not strictly about business but also about traveling, job interviews, presentations and much more.
If you click on the link I put here you can listen to a very good example of job interview. I particularly liked it because it is not too simple (so it was pretty a good challenge to try to understand it well!) and also because it contains a lot of words which might be useful for us in the future. We are all going to have a job interview one day or another… And it could be in English… Who knows? ;-) I think it is always worth having an idea of how we should behave when we apply for a job and these podcasts are very helpful in this way.
Before you click on the link you can also read a brief summary of what the listening is about, so that you can understand the content better.
- Englishfeed -President Bush and English
This is another fantastic website I found on del.icio.us. Here there are plenty of funny podcasts you can listen to when you are a little bit down… They will surely cheer you up! The one I want to suggest shows President Bush’s tendency to make up new words when he cannot express himself properly during his speeches… ;-) I can assure you it is simply awesome! Anyway, it was not so easy to understand (at least for me); as we are not native speakers we do not know if these expressions are just idioms or if they actually do not exist in English. Fortunately, those who put these files online were aware of this problem... They wrote a kind of glossary where they explained the meaning of every “bushism” :-) That really helped! Finally, another big advantage of this website is that you can also watch videos.
- Better at English -IM slang is invading everyday English
In this website you can find interesting files about how the spoken language has changed through the years. The podcast I chose deals with a very widespread tendency, that is the massive use of abbreviations (taken from the Instant Messaging slang) which American youths make when they speak. The file’s title caught my attention straightaway since we had already talked about that in class with Sarah a couple of weeks ago. The most popular abbreviations are “jk” (just kidding), “lol” (laughing out loud) or “rotfl” (rolling on the floor laughing). I knew that young people often use them when they chat, but I did not know they were so common in speaking as well!
As you have probably already understood I think podcasts are a great way to improve our listening skills. I guess everyone of us would like to do a lot of things during the day, but unfortunately the problem is that often we do not have enough time. But we do not need to spend hours in front of our computer to listen to these files, we can just download them and listen to them while we are on the bus or simply when we have time. Anyway, the biggest advantage is that they are FREE! I really hope that we will also be able to find free material and sources online in the future… That is the main gist of the Net, isn’t it? ;-)
See you soon and sorry for this endless post :-)
BYE!
