Elementary Podcasts by the British Council

English as a second language (esl)

English as a foreign language (efl)

PODCASTS

Podcasts are one of the most useful ways to improve your listening skills and comprehension.

Using your smartphone and a Podcast app such as Stitcher or Apple i-tunes can allow you to subscribe to a large number of ESL or EFL podcasts.  This will make listening to Egnlish for shrot periods of time much easier and contribute to developping a regular routine of English languag elistening.

Apart from podcasts aimed directly as students of English there are 100s of others in the English languge on almost any subject from art, history, or simply current events or daily news.

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Elementary Podcasts by the British Council

(iTunes – website)

Three cheers for the UK’s British Council who have come up with a very helpful series of English language podcasts for the beginner and intermediate learner.  Unusually for language learning podcasts these lessons are quite long, at about 25 minutes.  You can, of course, listen in one sitting.  But one of the joys of podcasts is you can pause when you want and pick up where you left off when there’s more time.

The hosts of each edition take the listener through a number of different scenarios.  These are acted out in dialogue and are the kind of situations people experience every day.  The podcasts also include broader discussions of some of the topics.  The presentation is lively, upbeat and engaging, and the English is spoken at near normal speed.  There is a lot of good accompanying material, some of which can be read beforehand to help the listener make the most of each lesson.