What is this?
Elllo is an opulent source of free listening materials that combines images with listening transcriptions. It has seven versions, quizzes, and various exercises to evoke variety for the user. One common feature amongst all of them is that you can show or hide the transcripts and download them along the exercises you want to test your learners on.
Why is it important?
As teachers, we have always suffered from lack of listening materials in general, and authentic ones in particular. Not only does Elllo have native speakers, but it also has interviews and a variety of dialects and accents from different people around the world. These listening transcripts are rather authentic because although they are made for the purpose of teaching, they are of high quality and can be considered rather authentic in general.
How to use it?
· A wide variety of tasks could be chosen from Views, Mixers, Games, News, Songs, Videos, points.
· It contains American and British English that is displayed on the shape of a flag to the right-hand side of the screen.
· After digging deep, I found some of them are quite useful and can be used efficiently and come are not that smart. Therefore, I will be talking about the use of Views, Mixer, Game, and Points.
· I will start with the most interactive ones, Points, because it displays snippets of the listening with some visual aids and stops automatically for the learner to answer the question. Learners have the liberty of repeating and choosing the right answer from a list of different options and they get a point as they go along.
The second type of tasks that intrigued me is Games.
· It is a series of interactive quizzes that use very nice visual aids and stops automatically to display the question which comes from a picture. According to the theories of SLA and multimodalities, learners pay attention to the pictures and the content rather on answering the question itself. Therefore, acquisition occurs unconsciously by use of a realia type of flashcards. If answered incorrectly learners can repeat or move on to the next question. By giving this option, it removes the general anxiety hallmark of quizzes and helps the learner focus on learning rather getting well in doing an exercise.
The next one is called Mixer and it prepares learners to listen to people from all different countries sharing their opinions on a specific topic or issue. It facilitates learners’ tolerance for different accents. In that sense, this type of tasks can be considered authentic:
The last one I want to talk about is a Views which is a collection between an interviewer and people that come from all walks of life including business, banking, scientists and professors.
· A common feature among all of the previous tasks is the Language Notes part that gives a special focus on special phrases, idioms, and phrasal verbs with appropriate listening explanation and different uses of the idioms. This kind of exercises reinforces the use of colloquial and natural day-to-day English that is different from the artificial one in the course books. As you can see in the image:
In every task there are downloadable sets of exercises that focus on vocabulary, comprehension, and the overall meaning. In other words, they reinforce, listening for gist, for the specific details, and for intensive details with the specific focus on phrases and idioms that revamps English to a near-native levels.
Limitations:
Some of the recordings are a little fabricated in the sense that they cannot be considered completely authentic. In addition, some of them have poor recording quality, especially the Songs and the News that are not very successful in terms of the design, too.
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