When teaching English in secondary school, as a teacher you will have to provide your students with opportunities to develop and improve their listening skills every now and then.

For this purpose, "select-language.com" offers a variety of nice audio files that can either be downloaded from the website or accessed via internet.
What is great about the audio files (despite the fact that they are FREE) is that they vary with regard to their degree of difficulty so that they are suitable for learners of different levels of proficiency. What is even better is that they also feature some useful material (worksheets as well as transcriptions of the audio part). So apart from listening to a text you can actually also read it and work with it.
This, in fact, is the reason why the creators of the site speak of "podcards" instead of "podcasts". :)

When you visit the website and click on "podcards" you will have to choose and click the flag of one of eight countries where English is spoken.
The podcards will thematically deal with your country of choice then.
Luckily,they do not focus on geographical facts alone. Some of the podcards deal with famous people from the respective countries, while others present regional specialities of the country in question.

Thus podcards become particularly suitable for group work activities where students are divided into small groups and are supposed to focus on one specific thematic aspect of a wider topic (such as for example Autralia, or New Zealand).

I think as future teachers it may come in useful to know this site! :)


(Charlotte)