Learning English Using Podcasts

How can you use a podcast?

The content of many podcasts is based around a short dialogue, which is repeated for you to be able to listen a second or even third time. Here are some more specific ideas:

• If you’re about to go abroad on vacation, listen to the appropriate chapters of the podcast  the day or week before, and learn some of the phrases you’ll need for different situations.
• For higher level students, try to find a podcast about a museum or location you will visit on your travels. Listening to commentaries about that place in the target language is useful and interesting.
• For fluency practice - mimic the voices on the podcast to improve your fluency.
• For specific new language focus - listen to a dialogue and use a dictionary to learn new words that aren’t in the podcast glossary.
• For pronunciation practice - listening and repeating key words and sounds on the podcast to improve accent and pronunciation, as the voices used are authentic speakers of the language.
• For examples of how to describe different lexical items - because of the detailed vocabulary list on the podcast the listener can follow how to give explanations and how to describe items.
• To practice reading aloud - using the PDF versions of the podcast.
• If you are having specific difficulty understanding the audio, you can read and listen at the same time, going through the dialogue a few times until you are more certain of the content. Then you can practise without the written support, developing your ‘ear’ for the language.

Benefit using podcast:

First is Listen to Native Speakers

·         Getting yourself used to listening to native speakers will make it easier to understand the language.

·         Will also help your pronunciation

·         Making your English sounds more natural and understandable by native speakers.

And next is You Already Have the Tools

·         You don’t really need anything else to start using podcasts to improve your English.

·         We can use Cellphone, ipod, mp3 player or mp4 player

And next is Everywhere, Anytime

With podcasts, you can decide when and where you learn English. While you’re enjoying that cup of coffee in a cafe, eating lunch, jogging, doing exercise at the gym or while being stuck in traffic jam, day or night, improving your English is just a button click away. What you need is just to make some time (10 minutes up to one hour, whatever works for you) and hit play.

And the last is Lots of Free Resources

Don’t limit yourself with only listening to American speakers, vary it with British or perhaps Australian accents. The Internet makes it easy to find podcasts with various English accents. Here is just a small collections of such resources. You can get more by searching for “learning english podcast”. You can also listen to news podcast by searching “english news podcast”.