Listening links for Advanced and Proficiency students

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

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/tae

or


A history of the world in 100 objects

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow

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: 

National Public Radio.org

npr.org

Here you can read articles and listen to programmes, news or podcasts

TED.com

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!

As you like it:Catching Up in an Age of Global English

I was re-reading a report today of a study into the future of the English language, published in 2007.

The report, 'As You Like It: Catching Up in an Age of Global English', focuses on various issues, including the continuing fall in the number of school and university students in the UK who study a language other than their mother tongue.

The pessimistic view expressed in the report about the state of foreign language learning in the UK seems to be born out by an article in the Times Higher Education last week,  with the headline:

"Tongue-tied UK badly equipped to join in the conversation of nations"

This report contains some thought-provoking figures, for example:

There has been a general fall in the number of people applying to UK universities this year :

Much of this decrease is explained by a sharp decline in applications from older students - those in their twenties as distinct from school-leavers aged 18 among whom the application rate is down only slightly.

The biggest worry is the marked decline in languages and related studies. There has long been anxiety that the new funding arrangements would adversely affect language studies, partly because many language courses require an additional year of study and thus an additional year's worth of debt. Now we have evidence. Applications to European language courses are down by 11.2 per cent, those to non-European languages are down by 21.5 per cent: both decreases are well above the average decline across all subjects.

The writer of the article: Sir Adam Roberts, is president of the British Academy. He expresses concerns raised in As You Like It, such as: 

We Brits are at risk of becoming a nation of monoglots in a world of polyglots. 

All this contrasts starkly with the article from the ABC I referred to in a previous post. The 25,000 Spaniards contributing to the National Insurance Scheme in the UK and the 40,000 Spanish students taking a language course somewhere in the UK each year.

I found myself nodding on reading the following reflection on learning another language in an article published in the Guardian yesterday: 

the initial years of studying a language are tough: there is no escape from the grind of learning how to conjugate verbs, construct sentences and to absorb enough words to begin to understand what is written and said.

To elect to do this, young boys and girls need to know that, like practising a musical instrument, designing clothes or playing a sport, the end-result will be worthwhile. They need teachers who can inspire them, classmates who encourage them and families who understand the value of the skill. In Britain, none of this exists to a sufficient degree.

 

Let's hope our students are not reluctant to learn another language and see it as something useful!!!

If you need some arguments to convince them, there are lots in this New York Times article:

English Is Global, So Why Learn Arabic?

You could give each student or group of students one of the different views put forward by the 6 debaters - all of them coincide in the desirability for everyone to speak at least one other language.

And you can also read what the readers of the New York Times have to say on the matter.

Why not follow this up with some essay writing practice:

"Everyone should learn at least one foreign language" Why?

My favourite English word

A fun warmer and peer teaching activity is to take a pack of post its.

Give one post it to each student in the class.  Ask them to think about their favourite English word and to write it on the post it.  Get each student to stand up and stick the post it with their word on a wall/the board.


Tell them read all the words, then to go back to their chairs.


Ask them questions to find out how much they remember:


1  What was the longest word?  (number of letters)


2  What was the shortest word?  (number of letters)


3  Which word has the most syllables?


4  Which was the most common first letter for your words?


5  Did anyone write the same word as you?


6  Do you really like any of the words (apart from your own)?


Next, in pairs or small groups, ask them to tell each other about their words - Why do you like your word?   When/where did you learn it?


When I have done this activity in class and in seminars, it's amazing how many of the words began with 'b' or 's'.  


This activity provides an ideal opportunity to discuss with students ways of remembering and noticing words.  They can hopefully use some of them for learning (and liking!) other words.

For more activities with post-its to use in the classroom, you could check out this website.




On the subject of favourite words, you could ask them to visit the post on this subject on the Macmillan Dictionary Blog and read which words other people have chosen and why.


I particularly liked these comments:  

I’ve never thought about that before but I guess it’s environment. When I was a student it was so difficult to pronounce it that when I finally learned I never forgot 
And I don’t know if it makes any sense but nowadays I’m really concerned about the environment lol

I guess it’s flip-flop, to me it sounds funny, especially when pronounced fast.

And an article about a survey carried out in 2004 by the British Council, involving 40,000 people in 102 countries, reports that the top five words were mother, passion, smile, love, eternity.


Some of my favourite English words are pernickety, cute and huge (I like short words with /ju:/, glimpse (I love the collection of consonants in this one).


What about YOU?  What's YOUR favourite English word?