These benefits are for students if you’re unsure whether you want to use podcasts as primary and supplementary text.
Listening to a podcast increases literacy and confidence.
For very young students, word recognition (or “decoding”) is the most important skill. However, for older students (middle and high school), decoding becomes less automatic, and listening comprehension becomes the primary component of learning language. Podcasts are a great way for students to improve their listening comprehension of complicated texts, both formal and casual. Students can also use transcripts to verify their success.
Students learning English as a second tongue report liking the way they can quickly “hear” what they are supposed to sound like. English-language learners need to be able to understand prosody and pronunciation. These are patterns of stress and intonation that people use when speaking.
Podcasts offer a wide range of topics and narrative styles.
With podcasts, you can choose the content and form that fits your particular lesson, and the possibilities are endless: fictional stories, educational and inspirational TED talks, current events/world news, history, sports, pop culture/entertainment, and investigative journalism. Podcasts allow students to explore a variety of communication methods, including narration, informal dialogue, scripted dialog, and interviews.
A variety of subject matter is a great way to keep the class engaged and allows them to access a wide range of knowledge and wisdom. English classes can get stuck in the same stories. Podcasts can keep you and your students engaged.
Students who are easily distracted by reading along can stay focused and focused when reading along.
Students say that listening to the audio while reading helps them focus and prevents them from “spacing out”. Many of our students recognize that they can go back and read what they don’t understand from the first time they heard it.
Podcasts are available for free and accessible. They’re always current.
The total cost of using podcasts in your classroom is $0, which happens to also be the budget most teachers have for classroom materials. Students feel more comfortable participating in conversations than listening to adults read or talk to them. Students feel that they are doing something unique, fresh, and exciting.