Listening and second language acquisiton theory --- Assignment

1.Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Topic: Easy Pet Care
Level: difficult
Type: conversation
Speakers: two men
Length: 2:28

This website provides variety of listening exercises for EFL learners from beginner to advance. I choose a difficult level conversation. The speakers have a causal talk with normal speed. Unlike the podcast in “ESL Pod. com,” the listening materials in “Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab” provides less information about the content in the podcast itself, which I think may be unsuitable for EFL beginners. Consequently, in order to compromise this weakness, it gives its visitors a number of rich and pedagogically sound collections of audio and video materials, which learners of all levels can use to listen to English, view the script, and answer comprehension questions. These marvelous collections of individual listening exercises and worksheets perfect for individual use or to supplement a class.


2. ESL Pod.com
Topic / Episode number: ESL Podcast 130 - Allergic to Cats
Tags: Relationships , Health/Medicine
Audio Index:
Slow dialog: 0:51
Explanations: 2:48
Fast dialog: 14:01

The speaker speaks clearly without linking and with right and easy-to-catch intonation. On the other hand, the host explains the content with appropriate speed and adding onomatopoeia from time to time. It makes listeners easier to catch the content of the podcast. Moreover, he will spell slowly the vocabularies and phrases he says and make a short explanation about their meaning as well as their grammatical use and the appropriate situation to use them. For example, the host explains the meaning of “give in”, and he also teaches the audiences that “give in” need a preposition “to”. The host will tell the listeners the different forms of a vocabulary, too.

3. CHINA 232 Fun English Lessons
Topic / Episode number: 084 - Queer Eye ESL podcast
Type: conversation
Speakers: two men
Length: 16:55

This site offers a series of news podcasts of interest primarily to Chinese but also other ESL and ELL students. The lessons are not actual news but news summaries called “lessons.” China 232 refers to the fictional radio station offering the podcasts. Though the speed of the conversation is slower than the normal speed, this podcast may still be difficult for the ESL learners below Intermediate level because the podcast lessons use a causal dialog format. The podcast starts with a long introduction between the two male hosts about the topic, later it moves on to the listening content, than the detail explanation about the vocabularies and phrases used in the podcast, finally is the short comment of the two hosts about this podcast. The extra information about one episode contains background introduction, English learning reading script, phrases and vocabulary used in the podcast. In addition to offering the free audio, the study support includes a news summary and a vocabulary list with definitions and explanations and new podcasts appear approximately once a week in this website.