web sites for the language teacher

Listening materials . . . and how tofind them

David Eastment

Almost two years ago, this column looked at sites for listening. Since thattime, the Internet has moved on. Some sites have disappeared, somehave developed, and new sites and services have emerged. The trend overthe last few years, inevitably, has been towards individuals andorganizations charging for their services. Text is cheap, but audio andvideo cost money to produce, and an increasing number of sites re?ectcommercial realities.

CNN now charges for all its video clips, for example. (It is worth notingthat the free transcripts service is still available: virtually anything youwatch on CNN is available via CNN Transcripts). Tom Snyders excellentDecisions, Decisions, with its high-quality videos, discussion boards, andteachers notes, now comes with a $60 price tag. The Eviews sitewhichprovides authentic listening and accompanying exercises aimed at post-FCE studentshas developed some good quality materials over the lastfew years, but charges 10 euros a month. The list goes on and on.

Free listening resources are still to be found, however. The recentlyrelaunched Euronews is available in six European languages, as well asEnglish, and o=ers around ten news clips with transcripts each day. Youstart up the video, then click on the link (usually the >rst sentence of thereport) to go to the full transcript. And there is more on Euronews thanjust current events: other topic areas include business, sports andculture. Few of these come with transcripts, however.

Voice of America o=ers a similar service, but with audio rather thanvideo. What makes VOA so useful is that a good deal of material isarchived, including signi>cant regional news reports and general interestprograms, all with full, accurate transcripts. There is also an interestingpronunciation service for people and places in the news.

The BBC is a key resource, of course. BBCi (the home of the BBC on theInternet) is a library, these days, rather than a broadcasterbut the bulkof what is available comes with no support for learners. The LearningEnglish area always has both audio and video on o=er, however, andchanges every few weeks.

The ESL Lab has become immensely popular: so much so, that if you justtype listening into Google, the Lab will appear >rst out of over >vemillion hits. It is an excellent site, but it has developed little over the last

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few years, and o=ers the same range of audio >les and exercises at threedi=erent levels.

What about lower level listening materials? Well, the choice is morelimited, but Specialized English o=ers an extensive range of broadcastsin language which is both simple and accessible, and signi>cantly sloweddown. The programmes have a Christian bias, without being too overtlyreligious, and come complete with transcripts.

All the above are pretty much mainstream, and will be familiar to manyreaders. But how does one go about >nding a wider range of listeningmaterials?

One strategyoften recommended in this columnis to head for thevarious EFL links pages. EL Easton has a good collection, with links tospeci>c exercises and topics, as well as Business English andPronunciation materials.

Alternatively, you could try the new generation of search engines. Teoma,for example, will let you search, and then re>ne your search, and willsimultaneously try to provide sets of resources. A search along the linesof,

listening materials

will get you far too many hits to be usable. But Teoma supports the samesyntax as Google, so you can specify that you want the word listening inthe title and e? or esl somewhere in the text, with,

intitle:listening e? OR esl

Experimenting with di=erent searches, for example, comprehension inthe title line, gives some idea of the wealth of material available. I usedTeoma to >nd the English Listening page at Ohio University, which hasdozens of links to material inside and outside the university.

And then, of course, there is the wonderful Google. Google used to have aserious ?aw: it was overly speci>c. A search for magazine would only>nd exact matches: not magazines, and certainly not journal, orreview, or quarterly. Google has now (September 2003) introduced thetilde (~) operator, however, which will try to >nd synonyms, cognates,plurals, and related items: a sort of massively extended or query.

For example, going to Google and typing in

~listening

will >nd you not only listening, but also listen, and hearing (and,unfortunately, listing).

This new feature needs to be used with care, and you can easily beoverwhelmed with too many hits. But if you re>ne your search with otheroperators, as explained in an earlier column, and if you are willing toexperiment, you can get some worthwhile results.

For example, you could specify that the words listening, elt, andmaterial (or something similar) all needed to be in the title of the pagewith a query like:

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allintitle:listening ~material elt

This would >nd you the ELT Listening Materials page at NewcastleUniversity: a set of short (3 to 10 minute) video clips for academic andnon-academic purposes, accompanied by some worksheets andsupporting resources.

Interesting (and free) listening clips are scattered all over the webthereare surprisingly few large collections. All you need is a few searchingskillsand considerable patience!

CNN Transcripts www.cnn.com/transcripts

Decisions, Decisions ddonline.tomsnyder.com

Eviews www.eviews.net

Euronews www.euronews.net

Voice of America www.voanews.com

BBC Learning English www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/

The ESL Cyber Listening Lab www.esl-lab.com

Specialized English specialized.english.net

EL Easton: Listening eleaston.com/listen.html

Teoma www.teoma.com

English Listening www.ohiou.edu/esl/english/listening.html

Google www.google.com

ELT Listening Materials www.sta=.ncl.ac.uk/r.w.gilmour/ELTMATER/video/

The reviewer

David Eastment is author of The Internet and ELT (SummertownPublishing) and co-author (with Scott Windeatt and David Hardisty) ofThe Internet (Oxford University Press). He travels widely as a CALLconsultant and freelance teacher trainer.

Email: david@eastment.com

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