On Friday, I was in San Sebastian giving a seminar. It was a very enjoyable session. Lots of contributions from the teachers who attended. And the drive there and back was very pleasant in the bright winter sunshine. Thanks to you all for a very pleasurable day!
Will be back in the city for another session again soon!
The focus of the session was:
Cambridge: Advanced Listening and Speaking
While I was preparing the session, I checked out various sources of materials for teachers both to use in class and to recommend their students to connect and listen to outside class. I wanted to share some of these with you in this post. I'm thinking about advanced (C1 and C2) level learners here - not beginners!
The Guardian
There is SO much material here.
Let's start with the portal of video clips.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/video
The videos are divided by topic areas, like you would find in a newspaper:
technology, politics, world news, life and style, science, society, music, film.
With Advanced level students, they should be able to pick and choose according to their interests and tastes.
Then, there are audio clips and podcasts here. However, I must admit, that I found it difficult to find a podcast I was particularly interested in and they tend to last around 50 - 60 minutes.
I was much more attracted to the audio slideshows. As I have told you before, I was born and grew up near Durham, so an audio slideshow called Leading Lights: Lumiére 2011 caught my eye.
Durham's Lumiere light festival 2011 saw artists such as Martin Creed, Peter Lewis and Compagnie Carabosse conjuring great balls of fire, light waterfalls cascading off bridges and illuminated figures leaping from buildings. Gary Calton asks the artists about their contributions,
Lasting just over 5 minutes, it is more of the the length of clip we could ask our students to watch and listen to for homework. And the fact that while you listen, you are shown some beautiful photos of the festival and effects makes it a very pleasurable listening experience!
There are lots of travel audio slideshows. One that I thought I might use as a Part 2 Cambridge: Advanced Listening Text was
Photographing Cycling. It's 3 minutes 36 seconds long, so a good length for this Part of the Test. I'll post the task I write for you here in a couple of days!
Other sites I would recommend as a source for listening materials for Advanced and Proficiency Listenings are:
BBC podcasts
eg The English we speak
or
A history of the world in 100 objects
The RSA channel on Youtube
On this channel, I particularly like:
RSAAnimates
While the speaker is talking, you seen an artist sketching related
pictures. Like the audio slideshows above, it adds interest and support. The are also mainly short in length, although longer than the Audio Slideshow on photographing cycling I referred to earlier.
Other sites I will mention here and come back to with specific recommendations in the future are:
Here you can read articles and listen to programmes, news or podcasts
Listen to talks here by different speakers (some famous, some not).
http://www.nobuna.com
And last, but not least, visit nobuna. This site has
different talks and news stories with a gap fill of the tapescript for students
to fill in. There seem to be hundreds
of these.
If you use any of these sites (or others) with your Advanced level students, let us know which ones they like!
