Podcasting, of great help in EFL class!

Podcasting is a website provides all kinds of audios, on which people can exchange each other’s thoughts from all over the world. As in the video Podcasting in Plain English described, it has three main advantages: 1 anyone can record an audio and share with others simply; 2 it’s convenient to subscribe and receive future shows; 3 you can download the listening materials to any devices like mp3 player, PC and iPod or iPad and listen to them whenever you want.

 For me podcasting is not a new tool to learn English, I used it to download lots of authentic listening materials like Tedtalk, which were of great help for my preparing for TOFEL test. As for my future teaching, I’ve found the website BBC World News for Children very helpful. In my high-school English class, our teacher would always let us do English speech dictation at least once a week. Those English speeches are not only authentic materials for practicing English listening but also set a great

model for students to write English essays.

 I choose to use the famous speech—‘I have a dream’ from Martin Luther King, Jr. as an example to make a lesson plan:

1. I will play this audio once without telling students any background knowledge to let them guess on what time and about what event he made this speech.

2. As students get some guessing of this audio, I will teach the background knowledge so that students’ questions about this audio could be answered.

3. Play the part of ‘I have a dream’ to let students do dictation. Play this part several times so that students can dictate more information.

4. Students will share the sentences they write down one by one as the order of the speech, so if one student didn’t catch the sentence, teacher can pay more attention to teach this part. (grammatical or structural problems, or new words)

5 Students try to read this speech as if they were Martin Luther King, Jr.

6 As for homework, students will write a speech for themselves imitating the structure “I have a dream, that …” to describe their future dreams.