I have been a great fan of BBC for as long as I can remember. As an English learner myself, I heavily relied on BBC news, TV shows and movies (mostly adaptations of classic literary texts) for my regular dose of ‘comprehensible input’ in English. Even as a teacher, I recommended these sources to my students. But, even though these sources provide excellent exposure to high quality English, there is a limitation to what a learner can actually do with them to improve his/her language skills.
I was excited to discover the Learning English section on the BBC website, recently. The site is inviting, easy to use and seems to have been developed by professional ESL/EFL teachers. I think it will be a very useful language-learning resource for my young adult learners, for it covers topics like General and Business English and also world News. Since, most of the learners in my context have instrumental motivations for learning English, these sections can be beneficial in focusing on specific language skills required for the purpose.
The site can be both in class and outside the classroom language-learning tool. The For Teachers section offers many interesting ideas on how the different features of the site can be used in class. Like for the Talking Business section, the website offers free downloadable worksheets that can be used in class to practice listening comprehension, pronunciation and even speaking skills in the form of group presentations and business meetings.
Excellent! The teacher page will come in handy with my students here in the U.S. and will prove quite useful if and when I get back to the U.K. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI don't have much cause to use the BBC for my Hebrew classes, but I know that they also provide BBC Arabic, which the Arabic classes here use a fair bit, which is pretty awesome. We watched a few clips in my classes when I was studying Arabic, and it was nice too to see news clips in the language that weren't specifically about the Middle East (that's all well and good, but it's nice to get different subject matter every once in a while).
ReplyDelete