A Library for English Listening

Have you ever thought about helping your students to be an autonomous English learner? In the context of Chinese classroom, it's quite rare for students to do listening exercises without being guided by teachers because not only they concentrate more on reading but also students have no idea where they can improve listening skill effectively and authentically. Fortunately, a library for English listening gives more possiblities in Enlgish listening learning. Let's take a close look at it.

Here is the URL https://www.elllo.org/

Introduction

Once you access the website, you will find all kinds of listening material including different levels. On the top of the home page, you can choose the video or audio as you like. Moreover, click "search" and you will be able to find a lot of useful content by selecting the "topic", "country", "level" and "media". It is definitely a library for everyone who wants to listen to diverse English conversations. There are also script, vocabulary summary and some quizzes to help you fully understand the listening.

Bring it into your classroom

After you locate your preference context, you have plenty of ways to associate it with teaching plan. For instance, adding some videos that have the similar topic in your lesson, showing multi-cultural interviews that have been done by native speakers to promote their motivation in learning English, using the conversations that have many grammar mistakes to encourage students to speak or creating some tasks according to teaching objectives.

More importantly, you should guide students to use it independently, helping them to realize how to find suitable and beneficial listening resources. Eventually, they gain from this library and become frequenters.

Here is a conversation with a Chinese student, talking about her school life.

Limitations

However, sometimes less is more, which means if you give too many choices, students may be confused and lose direction. It's really hard for them to identify which recording is better for them. Teachers need to do a lot of preparation work in order to find proper content. 

If you have ideas about applying this library in classroom, please do not hesitate to comment.