PODCASTS & PODCASTING

This week the new topic is Podcasts, i.e. the new multimedia files distributed over the Internet. Today my e-tivity is to find some podcasts that could be useful for my English listening practice. I searched for them in del.icio.us and obtained the following results:

Englishcaster : This is the one I like most among the ones I chose. It is a great site where you can find English lesson podcasts as well as other English study materials. For the podcasts you just have to click on the link in the home page and then you can choose among a list of categories, such as content, kind of English, level, target age and target nationality. In this way you can personalise your podcast research. For example, if you want to know what the New Zealand English sounds like, you just have to click on New Zealand under the category kind of English, then click on visit website and then click on the links that interest you. In this case you will find a link to the latest podcast of this site, i.e a 2 minutes video in English. It took me a little to understand how it all worked but it was worth a while.

Business English: In this site you can find many podcasts to listen to in order to practice your English. These podcasts mainly have to do with business topics. Therefore, it is a good source of new specific vocabulary.

English as a Second Language Podcast: Here you can find both a list of the latest podcasts and a list of the top ten podcasts pubblished on this site with the very aim of giving English learners a chance to practice their English. Every time you choose to listen to a podcast you are also given a script of the conversation, which you can follow while you are listening.

If you want to know what I think about podcasting in general, you can listen to me personally speaking in the following audio file...


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THE WEBSITE GENRE



The material on the Web we look through every day is amazingly heterogeneous and most people could find it difficult to classify it within a specific linguistic genre. According to the linguistic patterns that often characterize them, in his book "The Language of Websites", Mark Boardman divides websites into two different groups: institutional websites and personal websites. Here I’m going to analyse two websites taken from our del.icio.us collection from a linguistic point of view.

The first website is an Online Library. As its welcome message highlights the aim of this website is to provide students, teachers and the classic enthusiast with a large amount of free books. The way the creators of this website address their audience is through a formal English; they use short, complete sentences to describe how to use this on-line library, together with links made up of noun-phrases (e.g. author index) or imperative forms of action verbs (e.g. drop us a line) to guide their audience through the site. However, once you click on the name of an author, the language changes. It becomes even more formal and the information is divided into medium-length paragraphs just as in a literature book. Then there are a lot of hyperlinks to all the authors or books you can find in this online library.

The second website I chose is English Listening Practice. It defines itself as an updated self-study guide for teachers and students. The difference with the audience of the first website is that the audiency of this site is mainly made up of students that are learning English as a second language, while the first website also addressed English mother-tongue students. The aim of the website is to give its audience material to practice English listening and comprehension. The language is formal but there are not sentences put together into paragraghs, just very short sentences alone, sometimes even only noun-phrases. These are to describe the great amount of links of this website and the list of conversations it offers for the listening practice.

On the whole, what I have seen from analysing these two websites is that their main structure is made up of formal, short, complete sentences and a lot of hyperlinks, which in my opinion are the ones that better sum up the general attitude used by the creators of websites of this kind. The information given in these websites is organized in a completely different way than it would be on paper: everything is more schematic and concise. Short sentences substitute long paragraphs and noun-phrases become hyperlinks as if to tag additional information in a very short way.

Hope I have been clear enough!..bye, Isabella

Boardman, Mark (1990). The Language of Websites

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social bookmarking is a system through which peolpe can share their favourite sites with the rest of the world. To do this, public Web sites like “del.icio.us” were created. Any person can participate in social bookmarking, you just have to go for example to http://del.icio.us/ and register.

Once you have registered you can start posting your favourite Web sites and you can also start searching for the ones posted by other people that might interest you. This second procedure is made easier thanks to the fact that everybody ‘tags’ their favourite sites with words that describe it. So you just have to type a word that describes the kind of Web site you are looking for in that moment and a list of Websites with that tag will appear in front of you.

In my opinion, social bookmarking is a very useful alternative to sites like google. It is a very quick and effective system through which you can not only bookmark a great number of sites you want to remember, but also search for a site with the information you are looking for, which will certainly be a good site because of the fact that other peolpe thought it was worth bookmarking.

For example, my classmates and I, in this last week, have been searching for sites that could be useful for people who are learning English like us. We looked for 5 sites each. Among the ones they found, I considered particularly interesting the following:

- ESL - English as a Second Language is a comlpete Website for English learners. It has a lot of links and exercises that have to do with reading, writing, listening, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. (site chosen by Alice)
- Dictionary of Victorian London - Victorian History - 19th Century London - Social History is a sort of encyclopedia, rather than a dictionary. It contains a lot of information about 19th century London and therefore it is a good English reading exercise. (site chosen by Daniele)
- E. L. Easton - English Online contains interesting material concerning English listening, writing, speaking, reading and pronunciation. And there are also sections on business English. (site chosen by Lara)
- When You Can’t Get Started Writing « Writing English is a useful site which gives its reader some hints and tips to write a good English text. (site chosen by Valentina)
- English Club ~ Learn English Teach English is a good site for English learners. In it you can find many liks to lessons on English grammar, pronunciation, spelling, reading and writing. There are nice activities and games to do too. And there are also articles to read to improve your reading skills. (site chosen by Daniela)
- UsingEnglish.com - Learning English (ESL) Online is a site for the improvement of your linguistic skills. There are sections for your vocabulary, forums on the English language, articles to read and tests to evaluate your English. (site chosen by Francesca)

Isabella

Hello new reader, welcome to my first blog!

My name is Isabella and I study languages at the University of Padua. This year we have been introduced in the world of blogs and we are trying to learn everything that has to do with the blogosphere. Our next task is to create our own blog...so here it is! It's my very first blog so please feel free to post comments with any kind of suggestion that could be useful to better it! Hope to read something from you!
Bye!!
Isabella

LEARNING ENGLISH THROUGH BLOGGING


Languages are made up of many different registers and in order to know a foreign language as good as possible one must try to become familiar with all of its registers. Generally speaking I think there are two main registers: formal and informal. Usually at school and at university students are tought formal English.

This year at university I have just begun going to an English course which focuses its attention on the blogosphere and on the act of blogging. During these first two weeks I have had the chance to know a bit more about blogs in general ( I really did not know much about it before). Together with my classmates we all wrote an introduction about ourselves learning the first aim of blogging, which is also the aim of language in general: to communicate. Then we had to search for blogs that could interest us in internet. This activity was very useful for me because it obliged me to read a lot of blogs written in English, and therefore to make practice also (but noy only) with that part of English, the informal part, that we usually do not get to know in the classroom.

In my opinion blogging is a good way of learning English. To learn a language students should interact actively with someone who knows the language well. When blogging, you do not only have the chance to practice colloquial English with a native speaker but you also practice your writing and your reading skills. Therefore I believe that blogging is a complete and fun method to learn English. Of course I also believe that a basis of grammar and formal-English rules should be part of a student's knowledge before getting into the blogosphere in order to be able to single out what sometimes unfortunately in internet is not good English for your learning.