We need this for learning Real Culture

   I have learned about integrating content and language in our daily instruction, which means that content teachers and language teachers can work collaboratively. I like this teaching practice and I found podcasts is a perfect tool for this. Let’s talk back to the integration of language and content teaching: for instance, the art teacher’s course objective today is introducing British culture, while the language teacher can choose a similar topic at the same time. In this way, students would have some interest for language class and basic knowledge for art class. Podcasts is easy to target certain topics and incorporate more than one type of material: audio, video and images. I browsed a few links and attracted by BBC World News for Children. First, I like teaching children English in future and second, it is so detailed and comprehensive. Here is one image of its category.

As we can see from the image, it incorporates parts about news, sport, weather, autos, capitals, cultures and so on, which basically can satisfy what students interest and their subjects. And even its subcategories are also very organized, the following image is under culture category:

  I chose one episode Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Northern Soul to supplement the former example, which can nicely fit into a British culture class.  

  Even for teachers who do not collaborate with content teachers, it is still a impressive podcasts choice. From this Podcasts, student can learn the real culture. Language cannot be separated from culture and if so, it would be meaningless. Surely, there are more wonderful resources out there. Since we have podcasts, we do not need to worry about missing the critical part.