Cambridge Student Arcades

Cambridge University Press publishes many ESL textbooks, and they're putting a lot of the related audio on the web for anyone to download. They also have specific listening exercises for many of the chapters. Go to their Student Arcades page and select one of the textbooks and then the book level (most of the books would be for lower-level EAP classes.) Next, either download self-study audio, or click on "sort by activity type". The listening exercises are called "What do you hear?"

Real English

The Real English website has impromptu video interviews with a wide range of people, many of whom are simply folks on the street. They are often tagged and grouped around certain grammar points. Many also have exercises and pre-listening vocabulary lists.

Unfortunately, many of the interviews are quite fragmented with a very simple question-answer format and little followup or connection between the questions. (e.g., Q: What did you do yesterday. A: We shopped. Q: What do you hope to achieve before you die?...)

English Central

English Central is mainly a collection of existing videos, rather than a producer of content. They do, however, add some significant value.  First, they rank the videos for different English proficiency levels. Then, they add subtitles and provide an easy to use viewer. Next, they encourage students to record themselves speaking the lines from the video and use speech recognition software to indicate whether these have been spoken correctly or not. They also have vocabulary lists.

Overall, I think the main value is in the ranked, subtitled videos. The pronunciation check is not likely to be very effective and the glosses for the vocabulary vary a good deal in terms of how easy/accurate they are. Nevertheless, there is a large amount of material available, and it's worth checking out.

From TESL Canada

TESL Canada is collecting materials. Right now there are some monologues and dialogues designed by Brock University student Martin Woodyard. They include illustrations, a transcripts, and MP3s. For each transcript, the CLB level is indicated at the far right of the link, (e.g., Transcript-LateMono(for MP3 1-2-3-4)-L-4 is CLB 4). Permission is granted for classroom copying, but copyright remains with the creators.

Other non-listening resources are available here.

British Council Elementary Podcasts

The British Council has been doing elementary podcasts since 2008, so there's a lot of material there. The first two seasons' podcasts are about half an hour each, broken into multiple sections, while the third season had shortened them down to about 10 minutes each. Most of them are covered by a creative commons license, which allows you to freely reproduce them. Each has materials attached.

As you would expect, the accents are mostly British. The speaking can get a bit fast, but the content and the activities are aimed at quite low levels.

English Accent Coach

This website is being put together by Ron Thomson out of Brock U. It's currently in Beta, and will be changing a bit in the next few weeks, but it looks quite useful for helping learning hear the distinction between sounds. It's also likely good for TESL students learning about phonology and pronunciation.


It's a game-like interface that plays syllables or words containing target phonemes that have to then be identified. The sound quality is high and the the pronunciations are varied but natural. I would strongly recommend using earphones rather than speakers.

Focus on English

This is linked to from a Ryerson site, suggested by Irene Kosmas.

Focus on English is a set of basic situational-functional conversations. Topics include emotions, fashion, health, and shopping, and the conversations are very short. Perhaps suitable for levels 1-4 with most in the 2-3 range. Transcripts are sometimes available. The files all use the RealAudio format, so they're streamed--you can't download them. It looks like they don't want you to copy their stuff.

Level 1: New to school

There was a observation that sometimes the level 1 students enter the EAP program with very little English, so it would be beneficial to have some easier listenings for them to start with before we dive into the textbook. Listening that are just 2 - 5 minutes, using basic, common words, and ideally in an 'Education/College' or 'Making Introductions/Meeting Friends' theme.