How to Use Podcast in Your Teaching?

To be honest, I am a new user to Podcast. However, I have found a tons of advantages of using it for teaching purpose when I am digging some good Chinese Podcasts for learners. There are three main reasons why I plan to integrate Podcast in my future teaching. First, it does not require a lot of equipment. If students have any electronic equipment connected with internet, they can listen to it. Second, the information on Podcast is updated very fast, you don’t need to wait for a long time to get some useful information which can feed you. Third, since there are tons of podcasts, you can definitely find the suitable one to you or your students. Taking Chinese teaching as an example, I will consider about whether the podcast to be suitable for the learners’ level and if the podcasts are heavily accented. Chinese Lessons with Serge Melnyk is a podcast which I think I can use in my future Chinese teaching.

It is theme-based and learners can join the course at any time and start from any lesson they like. I chose one of more than 200 episodes as an example. In this episode, the host introduces the word ‘family’ first, and explains the origin and the meaning behind the character. In the post, there are many examples provided to support listeners’ comprehension. Many words and sentence structures are reviewed and integrated in new sentences with translation. The topic of this episode is about family. Vocabulary which is introduced in this episode includes ‘family’, ‘elder sister’, ‘younger brother’, ‘son’, ‘husband’, etc. All of new words which will appear in the dialogue are introduced in the beginning. There are three scenarios in this podcast episode. Another thing I like this podcast is that some special oral expressions which are very practical are introduced. At last, grammar is wrapped up. There are also transcripts and worksheets.

I will provide my adult Chinese learners with this podcast episode right after I have taught the lessons about family, and let them use it to review. It would be a little bit overwhelming for learners without any background knowledge to listen to it and learn from it because there is a lot of information in one episode. However, it would be my ideal additional online scaffolding for my students who have already learned the basic words and sentence structures in real class. In the class after they have listened to the Podcast, I would like to choose some useful conversations from the episode and let students role play.

This is just an example for my Chinese teaching, but I believe you definitely can find good Podcasts for your students no matter which what subject you are teaching.