Reaction to Podcast

I listened to a podcast from the site ESL Podcast. The podcast was called Types of Students in School.

I thought that this podcast was really good and could be used as a resource in teaching. I would use this podcast for students in their teens in high school. There is a dialogue in the podcast between two kids who are looking through an old yearbook and talking about the different types of people in the yearbook - nerds, jocks, dropouts, goths, etc. The vocabulary is very culturally relevant to American high school teenagers and teaches about the American high school environment. This would be very helpful for students just entering high school in America for the first time.

The speaker in the podcast speaks slow and methodically, but not slow enough to the point where it is boring. He is very descriptive and even spells out some of the specific vocabulary words such as y-e-a-r-b-o-o-k, n-e-r-d, etc. He goes into detail about each target word and gives a definition about each type of student you may encounter in a high school.

This would definitely be something to consider when working with teenage ESL students entering high school to give them a good idea of what to expect.