I listened to an Italian lesson, but I wasn't very impressed. First of all, most of the podcast was in English and the first two minutes and the last two minutes were spent more on advertising for their other products than it was on teaching Italian. The actual lesson was on the ten most common verbs in Italian. The speaker would explain what the verb meant and then give two example sentences. Sometimes the sentences were in the past, sometimes the present and he also switched from first, second and third person. This made everything a little more confusing. I think it would have been a better idea to focus in on a few verbs and gone through the conjugations more thoroughly. Overall, it wasn't great.
http://www.learnitalianpod.com/
For the English lesson, I listened to a podcast off of ESL pod. It was number 227. The nice thing about this podcast is that whenever the speaker came across a difficult word, he would stop and explain it and give other examples. Also, it was about vampires, which at the moment, might be a common topic since many vampire movies and books have recently came out. The bad side of this podcast is that it was 25 minutes long. That's way too long to keep my interest and I'll admit now I didn't listen to the whole thing. Also, he used some slang that I think is outdated, such as "get a life." I'm pretty sure I haven't heard that since junior high. Overall, I think this podcast was only OK, its length being its major downside.
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_all.php#
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1 year ago
I think the first podcast involved different aspects such as introducing new vocabulary and grammar at the same time which can be quite confusing for beginner level students. The use of both English and Italian could be helpful for beginner students, however I am not sure to what extent this could prove beneficial. Students could probably be introduced to the new vocabulary or grammar only in Italian if the new words or grammar were presented in a contextual manner.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it can be beneficial for beginning learners to have a little L1 mixed in with L2, but this also limits non-English speaking learners from learning Italian through this podcast. I mean, if you're first language is Japanese and you're trying to learn Italian, you would have to struggle with two new languages.
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