Documentaries from Australia

Posted by on Mar 11, 2013 in Listening, Reading, Videos |

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has some fantastic resources online:  Catalyst is a 10 minute documentary programme with transcripts, and Foreign Correspondent is a 30 minute news documentary programme with transcripts.  Both shows have a short introduction before the transcript begins.

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Watch the news in English

Posted by on Mar 11, 2013 in Listening, Reading, Videos |

The news is a great learning resource because you usually already know the context.  Just by looking at a few pictures, you can usually guess what the story is, so it’s easy to listen and connect what you hear with what you already know.  Euronews provides a transcript with each video in their “OUR LATEST VIDEO NEWS” section so you can listen first and then read if you’d like.

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Learning with your DVDs

Posted by on Mar 11, 2013 in Listening, Videos, Vocabulary |

Practicing English by watching films is good for improving your stamina, but there are other things you can do as well.  Take a film that you know very well from watching it in your mother tongue.  Now watch this movie in English (with English subtitles if you like) and you will learn all kinds of language because you know what they will say so you can pay attention to how they say it. When you’re watching a film for the first time, after a...

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Learning can be inspriational

Posted by on Mar 11, 2013 in Listening, Videos |

TED is an incredible organization that brings some of the most intelligent and passionate people in the world together to give lectures and inspire the rest of us with their ideas.  They also have subtitles in many languages and an excellent interactive transcript tool for every video.  For a taste of the amazing minds who participate in TED lectures, watch neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran talk about some very unusual things he has discovered...

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