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web sites for the language teacher

Listening materials . . . and how to

find them
David Eastment

Almost two years ago, this column looked at sites for listening. Since that
time, the Internet has moved on. Some sites have disappeared, some
have developed, and new sites and services have emerged. The trend over
the last few years, inevitably, has been towards individuals and
organizations charging for their services. Text is cheap, but audio and
video cost money to produce, and an increasing number of sites re?ect
commercial realities.
CNN now charges for all its video clips, for example. (It is worth noting
that the free transcripts service is still available: virtually anything you
watch on CNN is available via CNN Transcripts). Tom Snyder’s excellent
Decisions, Decisions, with its high-quality videos, discussion boards, and
teachers notes, now comes with a $60 price tag. The Eviews site—which
provides authentic listening and accompanying exercises aimed at post-
FCE students—has developed some good quality materials over the last
few years, but charges 10 euros a month. The list goes on and on.
Free listening resources are still to be found, however. The recently
relaunched Euronews is available in six European languages, as well as
English, and o=ers around ten news clips with transcripts each day. You
start up the video, then click on the link (usually the >rst sentence of the
report) to go to the full transcript. And there is more on Euronews than
just current events: other topic areas include business, sports and
culture. Few of these come with transcripts, however.
Voice of America o=ers a similar service, but with audio rather than
video. What makes VOA so useful is that a good deal of material is
archived, including signi>cant regional news reports and general interest
programs, all with full, accurate transcripts. There is also an interesting
pronunciation service for people and places in the news.
The BBC is a key resource, of course. BBCi (the home of the BBC on the
Internet) is a library, these days, rather than a broadcaster—but the bulk
of what is available comes with no support for learners. The Learning
English area always has both audio and video on o=er, however, and
changes every few weeks.
The ESL Lab has become immensely popular: so much so, that if you just
type ‘listening’ into Google, the Lab will appear >rst out of over >ve
million hits. It is an excellent site, but it has developed little over the last

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few years, and o=ers the same range of audio >les and exercises at three
di=erent levels.
What about lower level listening materials? Well, the choice is more
limited, but Specialized English o=ers an extensive range of broadcasts
in language which is both simple and accessible, and signi>cantly slowed
down. The programmes have a Christian bias, without being too overtly
religious, and come complete with transcripts.

All the above are pretty much mainstream, and will be familiar to many
readers. But how does one go about >nding a wider range of listening
materials?
One strategy—often recommended in this column—is to head for the
various EFL ‘links pages’. EL Easton has a good collection, with links to
speci>c exercises and topics, as well as Business English and
Pronunciation materials.
Alternatively, you could try the new generation of search engines. Teoma,
for example, will let you search, and then re>ne your search, and will
simultaneously try to provide sets of resources. A search along the lines
of,
listening materials
will get you far too many hits to be usable. But Teoma supports the same
syntax as Google, so you can specify that you want the word ‘listening’ in
the title and ‘e?’ or ‘esl’ somewhere in the text, with,
intitle:listening e? OR esl
Experimenting with di=erent searches, for example, ‘comprehension’ in
the title line, gives some idea of the wealth of material available. I used
Teoma to >nd the English Listening page at Ohio University, which has
dozens of links to material inside and outside the university.
And then, of course, there is the wonderful Google. Google used to have a
serious ?aw: it was overly speci>c. A search for ‘magazine’ would only
>nd exact matches: not ‘magazines’, and certainly not ‘journal’, or
‘review’, or ‘quarterly’. Google has now (September 2003) introduced the
tilde (~) operator, however, which will try to >nd synonyms, cognates,
plurals, and related items: a sort of massively extended ‘or’ query.
For example, going to Google and typing in
~listening
will >nd you not only ‘listening’, but also ‘listen’, and ‘hearing’ (and,
unfortunately, ‘listing’).
This new feature needs to be used with care, and you can easily be
overwhelmed with too many hits. But if you re>ne your search with other
operators, as explained in an earlier column, and if you are willing to
experiment, you can get some worthwhile results.
For example, you could specify that the words ‘listening’, ‘elt’, and
‘material’ (or something similar) all needed to be in the title of the page
with a query like:

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allintitle:listening ~material elt

This would >nd you the ELT Listening Materials page at Newcastle
University: a set of short (3 to 10 minute) video clips for academic and
non-academic purposes, accompanied by some worksheets and
supporting resources.
Interesting (and free) listening clips are scattered all over the web—there
are surprisingly few large collections. All you need is a few searching
skills—and considerable patience!
CNN Transcripts www.cnn.com/transcripts
Decisions, Decisions ddonline.tomsnyder.com
Eviews www.eviews.net
Euronews www.euronews.net
Voice of America www.voanews.com
BBC Learning English www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
The ESL Cyber Listening Lab www.esl-lab.com
Specialized English specialized.english.net
EL Easton: Listening eleaston.com/listen.html
Teoma www.teoma.com
English Listening www.ohiou.edu/esl/english/listening.html
Google www.google.com
ELT Listening Materials www.sta=.ncl.ac.uk/r.w.gilmour/ELTMATER/
video/

The reviewer
David Eastment is author of The Internet and ELT (Summertown
Publishing) and co-author (with Scott Windeatt and David Hardisty) of
The Internet (Oxford University Press). He travels widely as a CALL
consultant and freelance teacher trainer.
Email: [email protected]

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