Use Podcast in English Teaching

  English Café is a series of ESL podcast. It updates new episode every week. Each episode would talk about interesting topics on history, books, music, etc. I listened to the latest one episode, English Café 448, topic: Famous Songs – “Que Sera Sera”; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. In this episode, it provides the story of a famous song and a interesting book with a great deal of words to learn.

  I could use this episode as a motivator to engage students in learning new vocabulary. As all the new words are explicitly explained combined with the meaning of context--a song in the first part, student will learn new words while they learn how to sing a nice song and learn a nice story. It will be more interesting than simply ask them to recite those vocabularies.
  I could also use this podcast episode as a additional listening material for high school students to expand their horizon. I could ask students to write a refection paper or journal about what they learn from the content and bring it to the class to discuss. Students will discuss what they learned and the questions they got through the listening. Students will develop listening skills and communication skills through the task.
  Or I could make a list of questions for students to find answers through listening to the podcast. The object will be to let students improve the skill of grasping the gist of a content, learn how to locate key words in a listening material and predict meaning through the context. Or I could ask them to write down the script of the podcast.
  As this series is so helpful for students to expand their vocabulary, I would definitely recommend them to keep listening to it as a hobby.