It reminds me of a story an Omani student told me after he had been on his first trip alone to London. He summoned a taxi but was completely foxed by the taxi driver's question: 'Where to, sunshine?" The student replied, "Behind the clouds," thinking the taxi driver was asking where the sun had gone, as it was pouring with rain. The taxi driver, believing the student was a time-waster, drove on to find another fare. The student did no better with the next taxi whose driver seemed to be threatening violence by asking, "Can I drop you somewhere, squire?" The student decide to brave the underground system instead.
All this goes to prove that it is of vital importance that learners have exposure to examples of authentic, current spoken material in the target language. And in the traditional classroom plenty of material is now available on audio-cassette, video as well as radio and television. There is also access to spoken English on the Internet through clips from news broadcasts, but many of these are too difficult for students to use unaided. So it was with enormous interest that I discovered a new web site called the The English Listening Lounge, which has graded listening material available for English language learners. To access the clips you have first to download Real Audio , but once this is done the quality of the sound is superb. Gary Buck, the creator of the site has arranged the clips according to difficulty and has prepared a few questions for each one. The accents are mostly from the USA but he is adding to the repertoire and already a Vietnamese, an Indian and a Ukrainian accent are represented. A transcript of each section is available.
As an ELT professional, Gary has been able to produce materials that are carefully controlled in terms of the range of structures and vocabulary used at each level without sacrificing the spontaneity and authenticity of the passages. These are real people talking about their own lives and experiences so there is none of that theatrical falseness that accompanies so many of the specially produced listening tapes that support course books. There is no scripting and a minimum of editing, so the speakers are sometimes hesitant, repetitive and use idiomatic expressions in a natural way. As far as I know Gary is something of an innovator in this field. However, I hope that others will follow his example and produce additional interesting and instructive listening materials to enable students to experience real language as opposed to the written variety. Such sites are of enormous value to students working alone as well as to trainers like myself, who are setting up courses via the internet and always searching for support materials that students can access. If anyone knows of similar sites, please let me know.
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