20/07/2007 • 09:55 0
It’s not easy to come across listening exercises of the right kind
when it comes to teaching ESP. Talking Medicine is a website
you don’t want to miss if you teach English for medicine
purposes. It’s a relatively recent website offering recordings
of various medical genres with tapescripts and exercises (I
couldn’t test the latter due to server problems). Isn’t that
just great? Registration is free and easy.
31/08/2006 • 09:06 Comments Off
October is fast approaching so here are a few useful resources that ESP teachers may find useful when writing materials for their classes.
Finally, I’d like to recommend LAurence Anthony’s AntConc, a free concordancer that will help you find the vocabulary to focus on when creating exercises and provide examples that are REAL. (Of course, first you need to compile the texts you want to work with.)
Filed under: ESP, Podcasts, Useful sites/links
23/07/2006 • 15:27 Comments Off
On such a hot day some of us prefer staying at home in the shade. Luckily, places can be visited in the virtual world of the Internet too. Here are a few links to destinations that you may find interesting or rewarding to visit.
Armchair travel to Britain at BBC Worldservice’s Where’s next? quiz. (First you’ll read a short but informative text about a location, then you’ll listen to a short recording and answer a few questions. If you get your answers right, you’ll be able to move on to the next set of text, recording and questions. On finishing the third round of questions successfully, you can move on to the next destination. This quest is also a great place for students to improve their cultural knowledge of GB a bit and practice their reading & listening comprehension.)
Cumbria Lake District’s website offers a great deal of information to potential visitors. However, their website also boasts a number of great podcasts. You can listen to Cumbria’s summer gardens, Family Fun Day Out, Wonderful Windermere, Literary Walk and an interview with Eric Robson on the Lake District. These recordings can also be useful for students.
If you’re in the mood for culinary delights from around the world, here’re a few websites with podcasts for you: Chef line, Centennial wines and spirits, and New York Times Restaurant Update.
Collect Britain is another website worth visiting. Besides listening to dialects recordings and British wildlife sounds, you can also view Medieval maps & plans, Victorian photographs, Illuminated manuscripts and go on a thematic tour and explore the Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales, Lost Gardens, 19the Century East End and Literary Landscapes.
Enjoy it!
Filed under: Podcasts, Useful sites/links
26/02/2006 • 09:55 Comments Off
Teaching business English and looking for business podcasts? You may be interested to
visit StreetIQ and check their 10,000 podcasts and pick one or two for your class.
Mind you, searching for the right podcast may feel like being lost in the jungle if you are not familiar with the programmes. What’s more, their search facility is not very helpful as it keeps being delayed for at least 15 minutes. So be patient.
An extensive list of links to university podcast is offered by Thomson Peterson’s. Good luck.
Filed under: Podcasts
01/12/2005 • 21:15 Comments Off
When one starts digging… Well, I’ve just revisited Gardner Campbell’s article on podcasting (There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education) and got carried away to other podcating sites.
I’m happy with my subsequent find: I discovered that a number of universities (mainly American) offer podcasts of lectures. On the one hand, I may enjoy listening these lectures myself. On the other, podcasts of lectures can be a great resource teachers may want to use in a more advanced EFL/ESP class. They seem especially useful as a resource for materials development: students can practise note-taking or listening comprehension. What’s even better, you can choose a topic that your students are familiar with. Hurray!
However, plase remember that most podcasts are copyright protected. Perhaps the safest thing would be to write your exercises, hand them out to your students, or even better: put the instructions in your class blog and ask your students to follow the links, download the particular podcast, listen to it and do the exercises you created for them afterwards.
The blog post on academic podcasts at Productive Strategies was a great place to start my search. The links took me to a number of great web sites.
Berkley University has webcasts of both lectures and events (good search facility).
University Channel (Princeton) has a great collection of lectures and discussions here (good search facility). Purdue University’s site dedicated to podcasts is called BoilerCast and is packed with lectures that can be downloaded or listened to with RealPlayer or Windows Media Stream.
Washington College of Law offers lectures and on legal matters, while the podcasts site at the University of San Francisco School of Nursing focuses on medical issues relevant for nurses. Harvard University podcasts are computer science oriented
and Allegheny College offers podcasts on various topics ranging from management to literature.
Finally, Stanford on iTunes also offers a number of lectures, interviews, music and sports. The only problem is that I haven’t got the iTunes software yet. And what’s more, I need a better Internet connection!
