Back in January, I came across a post by Shaun Sweeney, in which he was inviting all fellow teachers to a new Facebook group he’d created, called TD Lab Staffroom.
The group is meant for English teachers who’d like to use authentic listening but don’t want to spend ages trying to find a recording suitable for their class. The idea is that you post a topic and fellow English teachers record very short monologues about these topics. Alternatively, post an article or a short YouTube video and fellow teachers record their responses.
All recordings made so far are being collected in a dedicated Google drive folder, along with the transcripts. The topics so far have included ‘tell about your commute’ (with elementary learners in mind), your take on New Year resolutions (and an update on those resolutions in June), Would you delete Facebook?, your take on news and media, and more than a dozen more.
I’ve been meaning to use this material, but the chance aroze only last week. The topic was What frustrates you? (posted by Daniel Christopher), and here’s a lesson plan that I wrote based on two recordings. When I listened to the two recordings, what struck me was how similarly they were structured: both contained plenty of hedging devices to avoid sounding too negative – things like ‘I should sort of relax about this I suppose, but…‘ and ‘This is just a little thing people do, but I just think..’, so I included a focus on that in the materials.
The (editable) materials are available in this Dropbox folder (the .pdf can also be downloaded from the SlideShare below) – but this is really just an example of what could be done using the recording shared in the group, so do join if you like the idea of the group. 🙂
Olya Sergeeva's ELT blog 