My task was to find a listening activity out of 12 in 30 minutes to enhance my students listening skills. I run out of time when I was looking into the 3rd listening option.
The first one was Movie segments to assess grammar goals I’m going to try it as soon as my school year starts because it’s a more entertaining way of dealing with grammar points. As a trigger, the tasks have some introductory questions on the topic and, this way students tend to speak naturally, giving their opinion.
The other I explored was Smories.com.
I liked it but found it a bit difficult for my children to understand. I think the site could be useful for intermediate students, but my pupils who are at that level are teens and I don't think they'll get hooked with these stories. I’d like to find out if any kid can upload a story.
The last one was Time 10 Questions, and I loved this site for my advanced students. They can deal with real English, the interviews are not too long and it’s always engaging to listen to famous people. The drawback I can see is that teachers have to prepare the activities and this is time consuming.
After listening to an interview, I thought of asking students to choose a person who they’d like to interview and write 10 interesting questions, then roleplay an interview with a classmate.
After the first 30 minutes had passed, I continued with the others options:
Nik''s Daily English Activities: Listen to a Movie Script: In this blog you can listen to a film and follow the scripts.
AMNewYork : I found this site useful to make students aware of different accents that they can hear in New York. I have some students who go there every year and they complain that they don’t understand New Yorkers. As soon as I start my lessons I’ll work with this site.
Listen and Write was the next. I enjoyed playing with songs (a source that I use frequently in my lessons). It’s not only good for students but also for teachers to keep trained. I have to continue exploring it because I found that there are groups but still don’t know how to access them. For example there’s a FCE group that may be useful as I prepare many students for taking that exam.
Backbone search Here you can find native and non-native people talking, so, along with AMNewYork the site can be useful to have different accents to listen to. There are no activities prepared, so teachers should prepare their own. I will try asking my students to interview each other and record their chat.
TED: In this site you can find talks on a wide variety of topics, you can choose the ones that cater for your students and have pre and post-listening discussions.
It is a very useful resource for conversation lessons.
Teaching with TED: I got hooked with this wiki. The talks from TED are used and in addition, there are many links to activities.
Wordia is not only a dictionary for kids, the site has also games to improve vocabulary. I’ll try it with my children lessons and find out their opinion.
Woices can be used with people who travel. They could make a route map with their itinerary and all the landmarks of the places they visited or are about to visit and then share with their classmates.
10,000 words: Here we can learn how to record, edit and publish audio.
