Podcasts are great fun!!

What is a podcast? Never heard before? Don’t worry, it seems a difficult tool but actually it’s very simple! 'A podcast is a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.' (Wikipedia)

Last Wednesday, I looked for funny podcasts in many different websites. Some podcasts were absolutely AMAZING!!! That’s why I downloaded them onto my computer; I added them into my favourite websites on del.icio.us; and finally, I added them to my podcast playlist on bloglines. I will briefly describe you the most useful and hilarious podcasts I found. While listening to these podcasts, I can learn English and have fun as well! It’s unbelievable, guys! These are the podcasts I selected for you:


1. Lesson 111- Seattle.
2. Lesson 109- Chomsky. (The Bob and Rob Show)
3. Proofreading tips. (Grammar Girl)
4.Rethinking Teacher training. (ELSPod.com).

My first choice was The Bob and Rob Show. The Bob and Rob Show is a variety show aimed at intermediate to advanced learners of English. It takes a very unconventional approach to teaching English because the programs deal with current exciting and unusual topics. As Bob and Rob point out, their show is definitely a hodgepodge!

Now, I give you few details about the speakers. Bob is from the West Coast of the United States. He lived in California until he was six, and then spent the next 16 years living in Oregon and Washington State. Rob is from North London. Although he is British, he has dual nationality because his parents are Italian. Now, Bob and Rob live in Japan, and they both teach English at the same university. In each podcast, these two bizarre speakers teach us idioms, grammar, and slang in both American and English flavours.

I can say that their accents are extremely funny and make me laugh a lot. Both the Seattle and Chomsky lessons are not serious and boring academic lessons at all. So, if you want to spend some minutes having fun...just listen to them, guys!

Grammar Girl is a completely different website. There, you’ll mostly find podcasts about grammar rules, common mistakes, tips to improve your oral and written English. Maybe, you read the post I sent some weeks ago to my blog where I explained some useful suggestions we had come up with in class. These suggestions dealt with the basic rules in order to make a good post. Well, most of the rules I listed are described by Grammar Girl, too. For example, Grammar Girl says that it’s always helpful to read your work out loud. (I stated the same thing in my post entitled ‘Making a good post’). Then, she also gives us further suggestions which hadn’t come in my mind. For example, she suggests to:

1) ‘Read your work backwards, starting with the last sentence and working your way in reverse order to the beginning. Supposedly this works better than reading through from the beginning because your brain knows what you meant to write, so you tend to skip over errors when you're reading forwards.

2) Always proofread a printed version of your work. I don't know why, but if I try to proofread on a computer monitor I always miss more errors than if I print out a copy and go over it on paper.

3) Give yourself some time. If possible, let your work sit for a while before you proofread it. It seems to me that if you are able to clear your mind and approach the writing from a fresh perspective, then your brain is more able to focus on the actual words, rather than seeing the words you think you wrote.’ (Mignon Fogarty).

Mignon Fogarty, the creator of Grammar Girl, believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Actually, she really manages to provide short, friendly tips to improve our writing. The thing I like best in this website is that Grammar Girl makes complex grammar questions simple with memory tricks to help us recall and apply some troublesome grammar rules.

The last but not the least: ESLPod.com. This website is run by a team of experienced English as a Second Language professors with over 30 years of experience. Dr. Lucy Tse writes scripts and story ideas for the podcasts, and records many of the dialogues and stories. The host for the podcast is Dr. Jeff McQuillan, who helps read the scripts and provides explanations for them.

The podcast I selected for you deals with a topic I am particularly interested in: rethinking teacher training. As I told you in my welcome post, my dream job is to become a teacher. Therefore, everything that is concerned with teaching is absolutely important to me! Especially, in the podcast you can listen to the reasons why many teachers decide to give up their job.

While listening to the podcast I came across a word I had never heard before: attrition. In my Collins COBUILD dictionary, I found that attrition means ‘the decrease in number of students or employees caused by people leaving and not being replaced’. The speaker states that teacher attrition happens when teachers quit their jobs and start a new career. This is a huge problem in the U.S., since as many as 50% of all teachers leave teaching in their first five years. Some leave because the pay is not very high, but many leave due to the stress involved in being a teacher nowadays.

This podcast is very popular because many people listened to it and sent their comments about the situation of teachers in US, in Germany, in Spain and in Russia. Concerned with this subject, there is an interesting article entitled Rethinking How to Teach the New Teachers by Denise Caruso, published in The New York Times. Caruso states that one option to solve the problem is to start teacher education students in front of the classroom teaching right away, instead of waiting until the end of their training.

In conclusion, podcasts are a great resource indeed. They enable you to listen to conversations and discussions on very interesting topics. So, it’s a very good way to improve our English.

It’s simple, it’s obvious, and it’s very powerful!

Hope it helps! Catch you later.

(photo sources)