Bring Podcasts to the Classroom

Using podcast in a language learning classroom has multiple folds of benefits to both teachers and learners. On that benefit list, the basic items would be being helpful for the learners to be exposed to authentic language and culture contexts, while on a higher level of benefits, the concept of using podcasts enables our learners to explore the world related to the target language in their own way and at their comfortable pace. For teachers, language teaching will be beyond textbook and classroom and can be stretched to more dimensions. Take some of the popular podcasts as an example.  I checked out National Public Radio podcasts to get started with the idea of using podcast in the classroom. I The featured Society and Culture StoryCorps was especially interesting to me because I believed that it would be a great resource for advanced learners to know more about American culture, society and values. Here are what I found and what can be used in a English learning classroom.

Let’s take the episode of “Gift from Your Parents” for example.  It is about 20 minutes’ long podcast, with shared life stories from people across the country. Those stories are very touching and inspiring, which will engage the students in thinking of what gifts they have gotten from their parents. The episode can be used for an example of story sharing in a flipped classroom and I can set up a new thread and invite everybody in the class to share their story after listening to the “Gift from Your Parents” podcast. I can also use this episode to prompt students’ reflecting upon their family values, family traditions and family impact on them. What will be more interesting is I can also use this episode in a lesson for target culture. Since all the stories shared in the podcast were real life story from all walks of life, it is a good opportunity for the students make connections with American culture and have sympathy to ordinary American people they have never met and known.

Putting all together, we can do various activities with even just one episode of podcasts. Let alone, students can explore much more with their own interests, learning goals and learning pace. So we are giving our students a hand tool for learning instead of a textbook, no matter how wonderful the textbook could be.