feed//www.rfi.fr/radiofr/podcast/
For this blog I am giving the teacher's perspective of a popular podcast. Radio France network produces a news show daily at a slightly slower speed than normal French speech. This is indeed at minimum an intermediate (think 2nd or 3rd year college French) program. There is no written script, so the students who use this on a daily or weekly basis will have to listen numerous times. The repetition is a good thing to improve listening skills. It could be listened to in class, allowing the teacher to stop at any point to discuss the terminology or ideas. It would work quite well as content for reaction journals.
http://radiolingua.com/2010/01/lesson-73-coffee-break-french/
Let's switch to the student's perspective of this podcast. Students will love the idea of following a story, and learning how to converse, repeating after the instructor in a conversational manner. It is user friendly for English L1 students, who can follow episodes of this Scottish production at their own pace. The story line is conversational, and the explanations in Scottish English are excellent. The caveat is that the student will hear both English and French, which can be confusing. This is best for beginners to intermediates. It would be a good way for false beginners to review. This has a cost of 12BP/year.
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1 year ago
I agree that the absence of a script offers the opportunity for a more extensive listening practice. Students will also benefit a lot by using the new terminology in a writing follow up actibity.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with the benefit of the script absence. It will increase the number of times students listen to the podcast, and I'm sure as they listen to it more, they are likely to catch more details.
ReplyDeleteIf I were a student, I want to get the script as closing task, after listening to the podcast enough. Students may have problem catching everything even if they listened to it tons of times. (for me, it happens many times...)
I do not agree that the absence of the script is beneficial. I think that it would be better if students are exposed to spoken and written language (input) at the same time.
ReplyDeleteIf the audio is way above the heads of the L2 learners, then of course, it would be counter productive. My personal perspective is that the teacher has to find something that will not overly frustrate the students. There is also the option of having them work in pairs to double up the background knowledge.
ReplyDeleteScript or no script, that is the question?
ReplyDeleteHow about we chunk up the listening, provide new vocabulary before they listen and ensure that they have mastered the meanings, then have them do the project without the whole script? Otherwise, we are not helping the students learn how to listen; they are still reading. As well, I don't think that we need to expect them to catch every word. A NS can't do that much of the time!