First of all, let me tell you that this is not a sponsored post. In fact, I have never been paid to feature a website or an app. I just write about what I find interesting to me or my students.
I bumped into High Level Listening quite by chance. Feeling a bit lazy myself but still wanting to offer my students the best, I did a web search hoping Google would do the work for me and find me vocabulary related to the media. Disappointingly, I couldn’t find anything I really, really liked (I apologize if you are reading this and you have published something wonderful. I am sorry, I have probably missed it).
Fortunately, the search was not in vain and in fact, ended up being quite fruitful as I found this wonderful website owned by two teachers, Pat from America and Mark from the Uk, who record natural conversations (1-2 minutes long) on common topics introducing relevant vocabulary in a natural way.
The audios are perfect for note-taking listening activities activating the vocabulary featured in the conversations. In most cases, there is no transcript for the audio but there is a glossary of terms students can benefit from. Also, in some cases, you can also request the transcript for free.
In my case, I am going to be focusing on Social Media vocabulary and to my delight, there are 5 posts dedicated to this topic. Check them out here
High Level Listening is perfect for B1 and B2 students who want to learn natural spoken English. I just hope they keep adding new topics.
Thanks, Sandy! Great post! Lots of ideas that now need to be put into practice. It won’t be this school year, though. Regular classes will be finishing in a week! 🙂
This looks like a great resource. Thanks for sharing it Cristina! I’ve already passed it on to my Proficiency students 🙂
Mark, it would be interesting to see some conversations on general topics that you then pull language out of, rather than starting with the language and creating the audio. For example a chat about a film you’ve both seen, which you then pull some phrases out of, either film-related or connected to other areas. This post on my blog might give you some ideas for the ways that you could pull language out of the conversation in a range of different ways: https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/good-omens-lesson-plan/ I look forward to seeing what you do with the site next!
Sandy
Hi Mark
Congrats on your excellent website. if you accept suggestions, we, teachers, often welcome audios that are topic-based. I have noticed you already have a nice bunch of them so I think you have figured it out this is what Students and teachers are normally on the lookout for.
Hi Cristina, this is Mark from High Level Listening! Thank you so much for your recommendation. Kat and I are always talking about bringing HLL back and this is great motivation to actually do it! Are there any topics you’d like to hear in the future? We’re al ears!
Thanks Will!
What a great resource & hopefully more topics will be added one day (last post June 2017). Recommending further, thanks Cristina!