As an ESL teacher for many years, I have found that advanced English listening activities, particularly those that use natural, everyday speech, are rather limited. So I am always looking for opportunities for my upper level students to practice listening to authentic speech. While I like to use news reports and TED Talks for listening practice, there is one aspect that is missing: the language of conversation.
News reports are good listening practice in general, but they have rather formal language, and are more limited in the type of vocabulary that can be found. I love the authentic and natural language used in TED Talks, and there are many ways to use them with English learners. However, TED Talks are presentations by an individual, so you don’t always get the same kind of language that occurs naturally in a conversation.
Of course, practicing listening skills to understand the main idea is important. However, at the higher levels of language learning, there are often missed opportunities to expand vocabulary because there is a tendency to just ignore specific information that was unclear.
Use natural conversations for teaching everyday language!
I really wanted to find some way to use natural conversation to help students practice their listening skills, while also building their vocabulary skills. For this reason, I teamed up with my dear friend Khrystyna, who also happens to be an ESL teacher, to create a podcast where we discuss different topics in a casual conversation format.
In this podcast, we have a topic and some general ideas about what we will discuss, but it is completely unscripted, so the language that happens is 100% natural. After the fact, we review the audio, and choose different language, grammar, or cultural points that came up during the conversation to highlight with explanations in show notes. This way, students can focus on some of the words and phrases or sentence structures that they might have otherwise overlooked. At the end of the show notes, there are also some discussion questions that could be used in a classroom for conversation practice, or they could also be used by individuals as a journal-writing activity.
You can listen to the audio files here, or you can find them on a podcast app. Keep in mind that if you use an app, you will probably have the option to slow the audio down if you find it difficult to catch as much as you would like. Below the audio links for each episode, you will find links to show notes, which you definitely want to download because they will be very helpful to review before and/or after listening to the episode.
We are brand new to this podcast journey, and we are still learning and improving as we go along, but we hope you will enjoy the conversations and find lots of interesting language, whether you are a student looking to improve your English or a teacher looking for resources for your students!
We invite you to check out the Podcast and we hope you enjoy the conversations!