Podcasts and radio programs to improve listening skills

One of the common language skills that we must master when learning English is perception of English-language information. You can develop this skill only by listening and analyzing English-language audio materials. Not only music, audiobooks, media are a source of living English. Podcasts are small audio and video recordings created in the style of radio and television broadcasts.

How to listen correctly to radio and podcasts in English for improving listening skills?

• allocate 30 minutes for the task per day;
• if the material is not clear to you - listen several times, write unknown words and expressions;
• choose those programs which are interesting to you;
• listen to audio materials of different genres : news , documentary programs, reports, interviews, audio plays , etc.
• Even if you don't concentrate 100% on the information, it's still you perceive information and increase passive vocabulary.

BBC News 6 Minute Grammar

Learn English grammar in six minutes. Every Tuesday join two of presenters and learn main grammar. Using audio material of the BBC channel news 6 minutes grammar on the topic " Infinitive and Gerund” helped students to better understand grammatical structures. Second-year students were asked to first listen to the program and fill in the table, then to submit an example from the program to each structure, and finally to take a quiz on the topic of the program. In this way, the following stages took place: familiarization and automation of the grammatical structure.

Elementary Podcasts of British Council

One of the British Council's most popular podcasts, suitable for beginners from Elementary to intermediate students. In the episodes, various everyday situations are acted out : at the airport, in a store, in a restaurant. Conversations are recorded at a slow pace, so it is easy to understand them. Also, a transcript and test tasks with answers are attached to each issue. The episodes are quite long - about 25 minutes each, but all materials are free.

So, podcasts in English from natives are a great opportunity to discover new worlds of information and develop knowledge of a foreign language.