Helpful Links and Resources

TED.com has a collection of short, powerful talks (known as TED Talks) that students can watch for free. Videos cover a range of topics – from science to business to global issues. Most videos have an interactive transcript that you can use to imitate the speaker’s intonation, timing, and stress. Some recommended videos are below.

StoryCorps is an online archive of interviews from everyday people in an effort to preserve and highlight unique stories and experiences. In addition to mirroring the intonation, rhythm, and thought groups of English speakers, students can also observe and practice conversational language occurring between two or more people in the interviews. All recordings have corresponding transcripts.

BBC 6 Minute English is “long-running series of topical discussion and new vocabulary, brought to you by your favourite BBC Learning English presenters.” We recommended using this resource for shadowing, as well.

VOA Learning English is “multimedia source of news and information for millions of English learners worldwide.” Offering content for a range of levels, VOA Learning English material is not only a great resource to practice listening and reading skills, but also a useful tool for shadowing, a key strategy to help improve pronunciation.

This I Believe is an international organization and radio program on National Public Radio. It features contributors reading personal essays that discuss “the core values that drive their everyday lives.” To work on connected speech, thought groups, and pauses, students can listen to the audio and follow along with detailed transcripts.

The Moth aims to “promote the art and craft of storytelling and to honor and celebrate the diversity and commonality of human experience.” The audio recordings of these diverse stories, told live to audiences, are a fantastic source of authentic material to practice shadowing. Some recommended videos with transcripts are below.

The 3-Minute Thesis Competition, founded by the University of Queensland in Australia, asks students to present their research in just three minutes. It is an excellent resource for shadowing academic English and learning from speakers with strong presentation skills.

English Accent Coach contains interactive, research-informed games that help users better recognize consonant and vowel sounds. By actively listening to and correctly identifying difficult sounds, learners can also improve their pronunciation.

Rachel’s English is a valuable tutorial site that features hundreds of videos, sound charts, and more!

ElementalEnglish.com is a collection of clearly explained video and audio lessons about English, including pronunciation and grammar. The pronunciation videos are particularly helpful because of the details and the helpful visuals.

English Central is a terrific tutorial website to help students improve their speaking clarity, listening skills, reading comprehension and vocabulary. The videos are very modern and consistently updated.

Hear Names is website where you can type in a name and hear it pronounced. Users can submit names to add to the growing database if the desired name isn’t already there.

Namez lets people share the correct pronunciation of their own names (or the name of a product or company) by recording it and then attaching it to emails, social profiles, CVs, and websites.

Artificial Intelligence Tools in the ESL Classroom is a short blog post that describes some ideas for using artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to boost your language learning journey. It also shares some suggested tools to practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

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