I would like to share my experiences of the website “Audio-Lingua”. This
website is a bank of recordings by native speakers and the recordings are free
to use. You can listen online, download the mp3 files or subscribe to a
podcast.
“Audio-Lingua” offers recordings in a variety of languages and in varying
degrees of severity. They are also classified according to CEFR which makes
them especially good to use since the syllabus for English in Lgr 11 is based
upon CEFR.
The languages you can choose from are English, French,
German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Occitan or Arabic.
Anyone who wants to can send in personal audio documents
and therefor you can listen not only to different languages but also to different
accents. This is very good when it comes to train oral comprehension I think,
since my students are so used to listening to me speaking English. They learn
to understand me, but will have a hard time understanding others. By using “Audio-Lingua”
they can listen to authentic English spoken with different accents and at
different speed.
You can browse to find suitable audio files for your
group of students and their interests. You can listen to someone describing
their room or a day at school as well as a receipes or a riddle.
I use this website quite often and I download the files I
find useful for whatever the lesson´s going to be about. I post the audio file in
the blog on UNIKUM (which is the communication channel for homework in my
class) for the students to listen to in advance. Sometimes I also give them
questions to answer to check their oral comprehension.
I hope that I inspired you to check out this website and
that you will find it useful.
I´ve never heard about this web-page before, but you definitely caught my interest! So I took a look at the page and I have to agree with you that it is a very good website for language learning!
ReplyDeleteThe first thing that I thought about was that the page was so easy to understand. I just had to click on the language I wanted to listen to and then follow the instructions. There is a lot of different choices on the search monitor (just as you show in the blog), so it is easy to find just the right level of your file.
Just as you say it is so good for the students to hear different accents. And by listening to them, they will hopefully hear that even if you are from India, Russia or Sweden you all speak the same language, and you can all understand each other. I think it is important however to listen to the files yourself before the students gets to hear them. Because since everyone can download their own files, you can´t always be sure that the content of the files correct. But I´m sure that you always do that!
I think that the fact that you have a blog where you download the files to the students are so good! I have to do that myself some time! It is perfect when you want to give the students homework, then they easily can go to the blog and listen to the file, or even download it to their smart-phone or Ipad.
Which ages do you think a suitable for this kind of work? At what ages do you work? I normally work with younger students (preschool class or grade 1), maybe they are too young for this kind of exercises.
/Malin
Dear Malin! Thank you for your comments. I´m really pleased that you found the website interesting. You make a good point about the importance of the teacher listening in advance. That is of course necessery when it comes to the content of the files as well as how it´s going to fit in to the lesson or if my students will be able to understand at all.
ReplyDeleteThis year I teach sixth graders since I teach English in my own class. Next year I will work with fourth graders.
I think it´s up to you to decide if your students are too young or not. If they have started learning English early, they might be ready for some of the easier audiofiles. It´s very interesting to try, I think. Kids really surprice you sometimes.
Best wishes / Lisa
I have heard about this website a few days ago. I have visited the webpage and I thought it was great. I'm glad you've written about it and I'm glad that you have been working on it with your pupils. Now I have more knowledge about what I could do if I were to teach the children in the school class. By the way I also think that is good that pupils can hear different accents so they can be prepared that everyone speaks different and in their own way.
ReplyDeleteGood Luck
// Ines
Hello!
ReplyDeleteThis was a really interesting web site!
I think it can be very useful when teaching English. It is great to be able to choose level and as you wrote Lisa it is classified according to CEFR. That is good since LGR 11 is linked to CEFR. I listened to some of the recordings at level A1, which is the level I teach in. They were short and clearly spoken, very good. I will use this in my class.
I find the web site easy to understand and use. Thank you for showing it!!!
//Carina RJ