Learning English needn’t be dull. There are plenty of resources you can use alongside your course materials to help you improve your English. One of the best is what you are using right now – the internet. The beauty of the internet is that you can access all manner of English language media to help with your reading, writing, listening and speaking practice. And what’s even better is that most of those resources are free!
Over the next few weeks we’ll explore these resources so you can find one that suits you. Starting with television, radio and films this week, moving onto books, magazines and newspapers, then blogs and forums, finishing with specific websites for learning English. If you have any online resources you use and like please get in touch and I’ll include them.
Television
Television is a great way to learn English and there’s a huge choice of websites you can choose from. This allows you to see programmes from all over the English-speaking world. Some of the best to access are news channels. These are good because, hopefully, the English you’ll hear should be grammatically correct and pronunciation should be clear. You can access many different news channels in the English language, including:
You can watch live or replay featured videos and read the reports that accompany them, which will help to improve your reading skills too. Videos are good because you can rewind if you didn’t quite catch something and listen again.
News is not the only television you can watch online. You can also access a huge and varied number of television shows. These are good for hearing how people speak in everyday life. What I mean by that is you’ll be able to listen to:
• accents – this applies to different areas of a country, for example people from London have a different accent to those from Liverpool, and people from different English speaking countries such as America and England have very different accents
• slang – this is generally not taught in English lessons, it’s something you’ll have to learn yourself. Don’t worry too much about localised slang, but it can be useful to know frequently used slang words
• colloquialisms – these are words, phrases or whole sentences that are used in native language, an example would be ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ which means it’s raining heavily
• pronunciation – you’ll be able to hear how the words are pronounced by native speakers
Some of these sites have copyrighted material so you may need to pay a small fee to access them but many offer free trials you could take advantage of. And if you don’t want to pay, there are hundreds more that offer access to the content for free. You can find these by simply typing ‘free online TV’ into your search engine. Here are a few websites to get you started:
Films
As well as episodes of television shows you can also watch films to improve your English skills. There are a hundreds of sites that allow access to films online. As with TV shows some of these may require a small membership fee. However, others do allow access for free. A few you can try are:
Radio
There are thousands of radio stations you can access for free online. You can listen to music, debate, drama and interviews. You can gain access to free radio stations on the following websites:
And, if you listen to music you can always view the playlist, which will tell you what is playing. Once you know the name of the artist and the song you can use another website to find the lyrics and sing along karaoke style, improving your vocabulary as you go.
Some websites where you can access song lyrics for free are:
Lyrics.com – in fact this websites also plays the songs you can search for
Next week we’ll focus on books, magazines and newspapers
