I've never used podcasts before...can they really be useful?

When I hear "podcasting," I think about people casually listening to something in their cars. I think about audio books, or how my favorite radio station talks about their 3 minute podcast. Some of my favorite TV shows also have characters that have created their own podcast. It seems very casual, and really just a way for people to express their opinions, communicate with each other, and simply shoot the breeze. Yes, I know, there are many educational podcasts out there, but these are the first things that come to my mind. I hadn't thought about using podcasting in my classroom. However, when reading over articles and researching how podcasting could be used for ELLs, I can definitely see a very different use for them. 

I hadn't thought about the fact that "listening" might be something that is often overlooked when it comes to teaching ELLs. Listening to academic language is a very important part to their development, but sometimes we are focusing so much on grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. Podcasts can not only help build their vocabulary skills, but also the very important aspect of listening skills. ELLs can learn the meaning of unknown words through listening to stories. One of the articles I referenced mentions, "Tier 1 words can be acquired through social interactions and in academic settings; however English language learners can struggle with Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary due to less frequent exposure. While there are many resources for teaching Tier 2 and 3 words through reading, there are fewer tools designed to teach academic vocabulary through listening." Social language is learned first through school and friends, and academic language comes later. Podcasts would help with learning this academic language because students could listen, and re-listen, on their own time. 

Podcasting will also take the strain off of students that are struggling with reading. Instead of only using reading to learn vocabulary for example, they can listen to this vocabulary as well as hear it in context. They're focusing on listening, instead of decoding. They are also practicing with language and vocabulary in context which is a more rich experience than to just hear words in isolation. It will help them with comprehension for sure.

This week's reading mentions some difficulties in using podcasting. To me, it seems more of a warning to make sure you find the right types of podcasts that will help your ELLs. English language learners have a limited vocabulary so it's important to remember that there may be a lot that they won't understanding in any given podcast. It would be important to make sure that they level of speech and vocabulary in the podcast was appropriate for what you need to use it for. A teacher needs to understand how many vocabulary words are necessary in order to understand a podcast for these learners. Basically we need to vet our resources. I don't see this as much of a challenge though because we should be watching the videos and reading the material we provide for our students anyway. I'm sure at this point in time, there are so many resources specifically made for ELLs that will help us to determine whether they can be useful or not. 

Podcasts are not going to be one size fits all, however, they can be a great added resource to our toolboxes. I see so many benefits in having information available for listening purposes, that's it worth it to try to find podcasts for our students. Anytime they can listen to speech, fluence, words in conversation and context, and what proper communication sounds like, it will only benefit them in their language learning process.

https://blog.listenwise.com/2022/03/using-podcasts-to-teach-academic-language-to-els/

Nurmukhamedov, U., & Sharakhimov, S. (2023). Corpus-Based Vocabulary Analysis of English Podcasts. RELC Journal, 54(1), 7–21. https://doi-org.wilkes.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0033688220979315