Although this website advertises its listening activities, it does incorporate reading and speaking as well. For example, one of the audio recordings is about dream houses. Real people from around the world give a brief explanation of their dream house. Students listen to the audio but can also follow along with the provided transcript. Students, therefore, are practicing listening, reading, and getting a sense of intonation, rhythm, and stress. (However, because many non-native English speakers have recordings, the suprasegmentals are not perfect).
After students listen to the recording and read the transcript, there are reading, speaking, and vocab quizzes that students can take. They are simple, but help students understand vocabulary and the main points. Most of the topics would be appropriate for high school students. Listening to real people give their opinions may encourage students to connect to the lesson and want to share their own opinions about the topic. For the dream house topic, I could extend it by having students write about their dream house, draw a sketch of it, and share it with their classmates. All 4 competencies could easily be woven together using this website.
You can find this site in my Resources list or you can click here.
Wow Regina, this website is awesome! I didn't know this kind of website actually existed. As you said, students can achieve so many skills at the same time, and I think that part is the greatest advantage this website holds.I also think that students will be more interested to work with this website since everything is done by real people around the world, instead of monotonous computer voices. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThis is indeed a great website for familiarizing students with authentic material. And, it has recordings on a wide variety of topics too. Another way of using these recordings could be to ask your students to summarize what they have heard and get them talking on the topic. Also, the teacher can do a pre-listening activity where she asks students to talk about the topic that they are about to listen to.
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