Humber News

Humber College runs a journalism program with a YouTube channel called Humber News. Humber News is produced by the final year journalism students at Humber College. It is a Toronto newscast broadcast three days a week. Its main mandate is to cover the community, including the college and surrounding area, as well as breaking news of interest to that community. It airs on Humber's internal television channel and on Youtube.

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?"

Dictation

Dictation is a good way to focus students on the details of language form rather than meaning. Of course, looking at form without understanding meaning impoverishes language learning, but an unrelenting focus on meaning can distract attention from form and slow learning. One site that provides dictation practice is Listen and Write. It requires students to create an account and log in, but it is free.

It has a number of levels and a level test. The levels test is in beta, and I was placed in level 6 of 10 (based on the graph) despite doing the test in earnest (Also, confusingly, the audio seems to go up to level 22). I think the problem may be that I was hitting punctuation where none was expected and then barrelling on past the error with each keystroke counting as a further error. I'm not really sure though.

Another thing to be careful of is that not all of the tracks are English, so look at the language label. Also, the audio quality varies. All in all, it's may be a good idea to vet a number of dictations yourself before sending your students to the site.

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.

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.

International business (level 5)

Here's some material on international business, especially business culture in Japan.

Career-related interviews

These are, as of this posting, 112 straightforward job-related interviews.