Great Questions

Great Questions is an interesting site for advanced English students to develop their listening and speaking skills. It is a section of Story Corps, a site whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives.

The Great Questions Lists and Great Questions Generator provide you with excellent questions that you can use when interviewing people about their lives or about the lives of others. The Great Questions Lists is just a list of questions that you can select on your own. The Great Questions Generator will help you select the best questions for the person or people you're planning to interview.

You can listen to lots of stories in the section Listen to stories of the site, and some of the stories have a transcript and can be downloaded. Simply click on More Stories, and then click on Read more... whenever the stories allow you to do so. On the right-hand side you will be able to check whether there is a transcript, if the story can be downloaded as a podcast, related stories and so on.

As an example, I have included the story submitted by Frank Kovac, who explains how he built a planetarium in his garden. Frank's story is perfect for us, as it illustrates everything we can get from Great Questions.

H/T to Free Technology for Teachers.

Summer movies

Listen to his NPR segment, where Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday discusses the films in this year's Cannes Film Festival, which might be expected to be released for general viewing this summer.

Nicole Kidman

This is an  oldish interview of Nicole Kidman with Ellen Degeneres. Anyway, it gives us a good chance to get to know the person behind her public image while we practise our listening skills.



You can read a transcript of the interview here.

Podcasts for advanced language learners

Huffduffer is a site that collects thousands of podcasts from many different sources.

The topics are really varied and there are helpful tags to lead us in the process of choosing one of our interest.

Unfortunately, transcripts are not available for all the podcasts, but the main interest of the site lies on the fact that they have done the work of finding authentic material to listen to, so we do not have to be surfing the net to spot audio files.

Huffduffer can be really helpful for us to prepare the listening tasks in the exam and to shake off whatever fears to authentic materials we might harbour.

Jonas Ridderstrale

Watch business guru Jonas Ridderstrale giving some advice on good management practice and asnwer these questions.

1. What is Dr. Jonas Ridderstrale´s 1st recipe?
2. How did ex- General Electric CEO Jack Welch describe hierarchical?
3. What is EBTS?
4. What is the 2nd recipe?
5. What did he say we (business) should focus all our energy on?
6. What is his definition of management?
7. What do managers spend 80% of their time doing?
8. What is the 3rd recipe?




H/T to El blog para aprender inglés.


Key:
1. Companies need to move beyond centralised solutions.
2. Companies show their face towards the CEO and show their ass to clients.
3. Expected time between surprises.
4. Don’t plan or try to predict, try instead to adapt to changes.
5. Focus on being the surprise / Focus on being the change.
6. The art and the science of stamping out (eradicating) deviance or deviants.
7. Managers spend 80% of their time dealing with 20% of products, people and businesses that perform the worst.
8. Look at the changes that are currently happening / Follow the evolution.

H/T This is an activity from El Blog para aprender inglés.

Job promotion

Watch this job interview where an employee is being interviewed to get a promotion in his company.

Note down the questions the employee is asked.



You can check the questions and the transcript here.

Soundboard

Soundboard seems to be the perfect site for advanced students. Here you will find thousands of sound clips and sound effects from radio and TV.

The clips are divided into categories: Radio, TV, games, celebrities, movies, historical, and so on. They can also be downloaded.

Awesome stories

Awesome stories is an interesting site for advanced learners of English, especially if they are keen on literature and current affairs issues.

On Awesome stories students have at their disposal a vast collection of stories, some of which include an audio file. They can also find video clips with extracts from films and interviews which revolve around issues our interest.

We remember... in 2010

The BBC has just released this slideshow where they review outstanding politicians, actors, sportspeople who have died in 2010. The slideshow is eight minutes long and optional captions to accompany the audio are available.

H/T  to Free Technology for Teachers.

A home for the future

A Home for the Future is an interactive display for The New York Times about a solar-powered home. Click on the photo and sound icons on the interactive image to learn about the features of a solar-powered home.

You can read the full article here.

John Lennon

The John Lennon site is full of surprises. News, articles, videos... and there are plenty of offers to buy his CDs as we may well expect.

Don't miss, though, the BBC2 interview with Yoko Ono on the Imagine Peace site.

Woody Allen

Listen to Woody Allen read his stories.

Interactive tour of The Galapagos

NOVA offers an interactive tour of the Galapagos Islands as they appear today and as Darwin saw them. The tour of the islands highlights the unique animals and geologic features on the islands. As visitors progress through the tour they can view view videos and images and listen to audio tracks about the islands. In contrast to the modern imagery of the islands, visitors can select the "What Darwin Saw" tour to view Darwin's sketches, excerpts of his writings, and listen to experts talk about what Darwin saw.

Newsy videos

Newsy comes close to perfection for English students who want to keep abreast of the latest news developments. The news items come together with their transcripts, and each piece of news is a mash-up from different sources -ABC, BBC, NBC, and so on.

All in all Newsy is an excellent place to develop our listening skills in an easy effortless way.

Growing up digital

Superb work by The New York Times, where we have a look at the dependence of today's youth on everything digital.

First of all, read this online article to gain some background information about the topic.

Now, listen to a group of youths expressing their views on how important everything digital is for them.

Finally, listen to the teachers' views:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/21/technology/20101121-brain-teachers.html

Edge video

Edge video might turn out to be an interesting site for advanced English students. Lots of interview videos together with their transcripts of well-known people.

Idea City

Idea City online is a real find. We can gain access to loads of talks by outstanding personalities from all fields without moving from our computer. The idea behind Idea City is somehow similar to that of TED talks, which we have already dealt with in a previous entry: top scientists, researchers, politicians, sports people, artists, writers and so on share a piece of their mind with the purpose of educating viewers for life.

Immigration debate

Watch the embedded video on immigration and answer the questions about it that follow.



1- How are immigrants portrayed, according to the woman speaking?
2- What percentage of household has been done by immigrants in 2004?
3- Which are the results of the study mentioned by the woman?
4- How much is the deficit going to be according to the speaker?
5- Explain with your own words the meaning of the following words heard on this video shot: welfare state, dropout and domestic policy.

Idioms

Idioms are one of the most difficult areas of English for students. We spend lots of time memorising them, and when the time comes, either we have forgotten them or are unsure about their use or use them wrongly. The BBC learning English site has this wonderful idioms section where we can learn a few of them while we develop our listening skills.

Iphone artist

Great NYT video story about someone who uses an iPhone app to make sketches of people on the New York subway.