LET: The Treasure Hunt Club

Marcel Van Amelsvoort
（Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign　Studies）
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Hello again! I hope you all had a nice relaxing holiday (or a productive
holiday!). With Golden Week behind us, it is usually a time of year to
look forward and I had planned to move on to our next skill area
(speaking) this month. However, a couple of really great listening sites
were introduced to me recently and so I thought I would go back and do
another column on listening.

Remember our criteria for a good listening resource?
1. It should be interesting.
2. It should be free.
3. It should not require extra or advanced technology or computer
literacy to access and it must load fast.
4. It should not be on sites that require registration or sites where the listening
material is hidden between the advertisements.
5. It should be stable (i.e., in the same place next week, next month, etc.).
6. There should be some sort of difficulty level label.
7. There should be vocabulary support.
8. There should be some exercises that encourage learning.

Well, a few more web sites meet most of these criteria and I thought some
LET members may be interested.

The first is CBC ESL. http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/esl/index.html. It is a
site recently built by Canada’s CBC (similar to NHK in Japan). Its
purpose is to help new Canadians learn English and learn about Canada
and a few of the listening units are a little too Canadian in their
focus. However, there are some good topics here (especially Terry Fox,
the environment, and maple syrup) and they are all clearly labeled by
level. The lessons are also very well organized and the site is very
user-friendly. The site’s administrators plan to add more in the future
if things go well.

Next, staying in Canada, is Takako’s Great Adventure, an online chapter
story about a young Japanese woman who goes to Vancouver to study. The
site has been around for a few years now and is very simple. It’s just
text and listening, with lots of resources to help students work their
way through successfully. This would make a nice ongoing listening
assignment for any class. http://international.ouc.bc.ca/takako
.

And finally, Face to Face http://itvs.org/facetoface/intro.html. This
site features the personal stories of Japanese Americans and Arab
Americans describing their feelings and experiences after the attacks on
the US in 1941 and 2001. You can listen to the personal stories of about
15 people in total. What makes this site special is the design and
content, and the fact that transcripts for all that is said are
available in the Activities section. Teachers will need to build lessons
out of this site, but there is a lot of interesting content and
resources with which to do that.

This week’s Treasure Hunt.

This week’s site is one of our listening sites. Find the correct section,
listen to the content and try the questions below. Happy hunting!

Here’s the site: http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/esl/index.html.
Here are the questions:

1. Terry Fox was a famous runner in Canada. What was special about him?
2. In what year did Canada officially abolish the death penalty?
3. What did Canadian doctor Norman Bethune do that made him so famous in
China?

[Marcel Van Amelsvoort/ Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign
Studies]

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