If you are a teacher and you are looking for some free material to use in class or even out of class with your students, then ELLLO English is well worth looking at. It offers a huge archive of audio recordings, video recordings and related exercises that the teacher can use in the class or set for homework. The content is organised into levels and recently they added some more low level content.

One of the most interesting features of ELLLO English is that it includes a wide range of non-natives speaking English. Most young people will be using their English to speak with other foreign people. So for example an Italian will use English to communicate with someone from Poland or a French girl will be using her English to communicate with someone from China. It is therefore very important that students actually get exposed to a whole range of people speaking English. Sometimes it is quite hard to explain this to students and teachers, who always want to use native models of English. Yet it is a real problem, especially for example in Higher Education where there tends to be a very international community and where the lingua  franca is generally English. Students often complain that they can’t understand non native accents.

ELLLO English provides hundreds of recordings of different nationalities speaking English. These are usually marked with a flag, to show the country of origin of the speaker. In fact it can be quite an interesting way of introducing the students to accents. You can play a segment of a conversation and then ask the students what countries they think the speakers are from.

As I mentioned, the content is organised into levels and these go from level 2 to level 7. Level 2 is fairly basic and would be around A1/A2 level. There are normally a series of exercises that the students can do too and these are based around comprehension and vocabulary.  The number of exercises does tend to vary depending on the listening activity you choose but they are all self-checking, so the students can work with the material at home.

As well as a huge collection of audio recordings, there are also some recordings that include video. These are often monologues with the students answering one question or talking about one subject. I am a big fan of being able to listen and read at the same time. I thinks this technique is especially useful at low levels. This is one of the things I most like about ELLLO English, it offers you the subtitles/ transcript too so the students can listen and follow the subtitles at the same time. You are able to turn the transcript on and off in most cases too.

If you decide to use the audio in class, you might want to download the audio rather than play it from the internet. You can do this easily by just right-clicking over the sound file with a PC and then choosing “save audio as..” This will download the file as an MP3 file that your computer will be able to play back easily in the class. Other times, there is simply a link that you can click on to download the audio.

I often use the material on this site for a stimulus. So for example, if I am going to get the students to talk about their favourite place in their country, I might start by getting the students to listen to other people talking about the same topic as a sort of model. For example I might get them to listen and extract all the questions from the dialogue. I then ask the students to work in pairs and think of more questions based around the same topic. Another nice activity is to get the students to actually make their own monologues just like the ones in ELLLO English. For example, the students can watch an example monologue first, to get the idea and then prepare and record their own monologue. They can choose the topic, organise the script or prepare their script and then record themselves. These monologues only have to be about 30 seconds long and students can easily record them on their telephones or by using the webcam on the iPAD or on a computer.

Here is a quick video guide to using ELLLO English:

 

Russell Stannard

Educational Director

NILE associate trainer ( Norwich Institute for Language Education)

Winner of:

Times Higher Outstanding Initiative in ICT

British Council ELTons award for technology

University of Westminster Excellence in Teaching and Learning