USING MOBILE PODCASTS IN ENGLISH LESSONS

USING MOBILE PODCASTS IN ENGLISH LESSONS

Togzhan Mukhtar

Master's degree, 2nd year, specialty "two foreign languages" University of International Business,

Kazakhstan, Almaty

 ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕ МОБИЛЬНЫХ ПОДКАСТОВ НА УРОКАХ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

Мухтар Тоғжан Габиткызы

магистратура, 2 курс, специальность «два иностранных языка» Университет Международного Бизнеса

Казахстан, г.Алматы

ABSTRACT

Podcasts are an effective tool for improving speaking and listening skills. They solve many methodological problems, such as the formation of auditory skills, teaching correct pronunciation, enriching vocabulary and improving knowledge of grammar.

Despite the growing need for modern innovative tools such as podcasts, students still experience difficulties in listening to and understanding foreign speech.

Thus, the inclusion of podcasts in school education is essential for comprehensive and effective learning.

АННОТАЦИЯ

Подкасты являются эффективным инструментом при совершенствовании разговорных и аудиальных навыков. Они решают множество методологических проблем, таких как формирование слуховых навыков, обучение правильному произношению, обогащение словарного запаса и улучшение знаний грамматики. Несмотря на растущую потребность в современных инновационных инструментах, таких как подкасты, школьники все еще испытывают трудности в прослушивании и понимании иностранной речи.

Таким образом, включение подкастов в школьное образование является необходимым для комплексного и эффективного обучения.

Keywords: podcasts, foreign language, listening, speaking skills, innovative tools.

Ключевые слова: подкасты, иностранный язык, аудирование, разговорные навыки, инновационные инструменты.

Podcasts are an effective way to build and develop listening skills (the ability to listen to and hear information in a foreign language) as they can be listened to multiple times outside the classroom. Students love to quickly switch to different pages on the Internet, so the convenient online manipulation of podcasts in the inverted classroom allows them to work at a fast or slow pace, listening to different passages from the entire program.

The features of working with podcasts are the following:

- Formation by the user of the user’s personal zone and its management;

- Connection of services for a podcast by a user in his personal account;

- Creation and placement of online podcasts;

- Posting comments without the right of users to make changes to them;

- Possibility for each registered user to listen to a podcast [1, p. 126].

Podcasts in the study of a foreign language allow you to solve a large number of methodological problems. They form auditory skills, teach correct pronunciation, enrich vocabulary, improve knowledge of grammar, develop oral and written speech [2, p. 92].

Considering the ways to use podcasts, we can highlight the following ones:

- Listening online without downloading a file;

- Downloading the file and its subsequent listening on any mobile devices;

- Record one’s podcasts and post them online [3, p. 135].

Thus, podcasts are useful not only for developing listening skills, but also for teaching students how to speak and write. Most students experience difficulties during listening. Practice shows that listening, understanding and memorizing information by ear is the most difficult task in the development of speech activity in a foreign language. The problems are exacerbated if students do not listen to audio files in a foreign language on their own at home, the teacher cannot fully build teaching in a foreign language, and the number of classroom hours at the university is reduced every year. All this points to the impossibility of developing listening skills without the involvement of modern distance technologies, including podcasts in a flipped classroom.

Today, podcasting technology is simply necessary for the full and effective study of a foreign language. At the same time, many podcasts on various topics are posted on the Internet, allowing students to independently listen to information on issues of interest to them. Moreover, podcasts can be selected according to the level of knowledge of the language. Listening to podcasts not only develops listening skills, but also significantly motivates students, helps to reveal their creative potential due to a number of reasons:

- Modern distance technologies are included in the traditional education system; mobile devices make listening to podcasts available to all students;

- Podcasts can be listened to many times in accordance with the characteristics of the student's personality development, the specifics of the task, the level of language proficiency, etc.;

- Podcasts are usually supported by visual content: text file or video material;

- Podcasts can be selected according to the age and specialty of the student [55, p. 287].

Scientists argue that students who are taught using podcasts demonstrate a higher level of knowledge compared to those who learn only by performing traditional types of tasks [4, p. 63].

I.P. Golovchuk and A.K. Maksimova write that thanks to the use of podcasts in educational activities, it is possible to bring students to a fundamentally new level of intercultural foreign language communication, since this allows them to form all the necessary extralinguistic skills, moreover, students simultaneously develop the ability to work in a team and experience less difficulty in overcoming the language barrier [5, p. 144].

Thus, today all participants in the educational process have received new broad opportunities for the productive use of high technologies to increase the level of knowledge. Teachers need to master these technologies, constantly engage in self- education and apply creative approaches in developing assignments for students. When choosing podcasts for work in a flipped classroom, it is important, in our opinion, to rely on the real needs and interests of students so that learning a foreign language is an interesting and promising activity for them.

There are recommendations for choosing suitable podcasts for teaching a foreign language:

1. Reliability. It is important to use podcasts that are recorded by native speakers, as students can immediately immerse themselves in the language environment, listen to the correct pronunciation, and pay attention to intonation. To do this, it is better to use well-known sites, including educational platforms. In the field of education, it is useful to turn to trusted podcast sources, authoritative internationally recognized resources, which have been created by experts, native educators and methodologists.

2. Compliance of the content of the podcast with the interests of students. It is useful to ask students in advance about their interests and hobbies, taking into account their specialty and study program. There are a huge number of podcasts, so the choice is almost unlimited. Many educational resources sort podcasts into categories and topics, so it doesn't take long to search.

3. Accessibility for understanding. You should choose podcasts that students can correctly understand, hear the necessary information, and have time to make notes. At the same time, it is important to take into account the vocabulary, grammar and technical availability of podcasts, since each student should have free access to them from any mobile device. On average, a podcast should be 4 minutes long for beginner level students and about 9 minutes for advanced level students.

4. Relevance and novelty. It is important to choose podcasts that aim to create new experiences and provide interesting, useful information on learning topics. Most sources feature podcasts that analyze news from various areas of public life. In this regard, students can not only develop listening skills, but also broaden their horizons at the same time, learn to critically comprehend information in order to formulate their own ideas and proposals later.

5. Correspondence of the podcast to the level of knowledge of the language of students. To do this, students must first be competently tested. Most educational platforms categorize podcasts according to the level of difficulty and the level of preparedness of students (beginner, intermediate and advanced levels). In connection with this criterion, the duration of podcasts is also ranked (from 4 minutes for beginners to 9 minutes for an advanced level of knowledge), as well as the speed of speech, the complexity of vocabulary and grammar.

6. Sociocultural orientation. Podcasts are designed to enrich students with knowledge about the culture of native speakers of the target language: mentality, history, traditions, rules of conduct, manners, etc. In this regard, the socio-cultural component of the podcast becomes a priority, which is aimed at the formation of a multicultural linguistic personality so that students can freely communicate with native speakers.

7. Formation of an active life position. It is important to select podcasts that address issues that each person faces. This will allow students to think about how they could take part in solving problems that are relevant to society. At the same time, it is useful to give examples of people who show an active life position, so that students strive to be like them and can take note of their useful advice.

8. Personal orientation. When choosing podcasts, one should take into account the peculiarities of the emotional and sensory perception of students in order to offer those exercises and tasks that will allow them to express their opinions and feelings, offer options for solving the problems discussed, and share their experience.

9. Cognitive value. In the education system, including the study of a foreign language, the developmental aspect is especially important. In this regard, podcasts should be focused on providing interesting information, expanding horizons, developing thinking and, in general, students' knowledge.

10. Involvement and motivation. It should strive to develop positive needs and motivation of students. To do this, it is important to understand the motives for teaching students, their expectations, hopes for the future. All this will allow them to form an intellectual need for constant self-education and will stimulate their desire to listen to more podcasts [6, p. 66-67].

Nowadays, podcasts are available to educators when preparing e-learning materials covering almost all topics that would be useful in teaching listening to students, depending on the specialty in which the students are trained. One can subscribe to various thematic audio files on the problems of science, education, culture, history, geography, etc.

Most podcasts can be found in a variety of ways, downloaded or listened to for free. There are many podcasts on the BBC site, available through the Apple Podcasts app (automatically installed on Apple devices) or through the iTunes podcast tab, but a regular Google search can also be helpful. In particular, one can find “movie review podcasts” and get many examples.

After finding a suitable podcast, students should read the summary and suggest three key topics that could potentially be talked about in the podcast, then listen and check. One can also write out ten words, phrases or phrases that are supposed to sound in the podcast, and then check whether this hypothesis was confirmed by adding those of them that appeared unexpectedly when listening to the text. If one regularly listens to podcasts on various topics, ne will notice that the same phrases appear quite often. It is helpful for students to play a two-minute podcast, pause and predict what will be discussed next, and then continue listening to see if the assumptions were correct. It is useful to repeat this exercise in several different places on the podcast.

Students can also listen to the entire podcast without stopping. They should then write a summary of what they heard or make an appropriate audio recording. Then one can listen to the podcast again and see what else he can add to the previously recorded recording. Repetition strengthens students’ confidence in the correctness and usefulness of the actions performed.

Similar exercises are possible for grammar. One should choose a specific topic of grammatical material that he needs to master, then try to hear the features of its application in podcasts and write down how many times and in what contexts this grammatical material was encountered. It is important to listen to the podcast and repeat what it says repeatedly to improve pronunciation.

Teachers can use podcasts in the classroom or for homework when preparing for foreign language classes. In order to do it, one can take an excerpt from a podcast and present a new topic based on it. Particularly when it comes to the environment, one can use materials from the BBC series “Costing the Earth”. Identity research can be done through programs from the BBC “Identity” series, which was released in 2016 [7, 90 p.].

Teachers can first ensure that an excerpt from the textbook is listened to and then play a podcast intended for native speakers. At the same time, students can be asked to think about the differences between them, for example, in the speed of speech, intonation, clarity of pronunciation, the ability to easily distinguish between speakers, etc. This will allow students to appreciate how easy it is to understand the spoken text of the textbook and unadapted English-language podcasts, and the teacher will suggest further assignments in the areas in which they had the most problems.

The teacher should use podcast excerpts to focus on the features of coherent speech. They can be cut using free software like Audacity or mp3cut. It is like a mini dictation. One can instruct students to choose a podcast that they want to listen to as homework, set the selection criteria. During the first ten minutes of the next lesson, students can talk about the podcasts they listened to, explain their choices, tell how easy or difficult it was to understand them, and whether they managed to learn something new from them (language or content). Performing such actions regularly is part of the overall system for developing listening skills.

The teacher should explain to students that they should not be discouraged if they find it difficult to understand the podcast at first. In podcasts, text can be spoken out too quickly, and speech can use a lot of new vocabulary, so it is important to keep listening and be patient. Over time, there will be more understanding of podcasts and the skill of listening and hearing information will appear frequent listening allows one to quickly develop the corresponding skill.

The teacher needs to select the level and speed of language in podcasts for classroom and home lessons, which often contain a lot of cultural information, which will further complicate the task for students if they are not familiar with podcasts or have hardly heard of authentic material before [8, p. 64].

Thus, the effectiveness of the formation and development of listening skills using podcasts in teaching foreign languages significantly increases, as evidenced by the results of specialized scientific research. At the same time, nowadays more experiments are required in this area, so that later it would be possible to develop on their basis complex methods of developing listening skills among students studying a foreign language in linguistic and non-linguistic universities.

The flipped classroom model is a type of blended learning that includes forms of traditional classroom and e-learning with modern multimedia devices. The flipped class allows the teacher to provide students with theoretical material for self-study at home, so that later during the classroom sessions they will discuss together only the most difficult aspects of new topics, as well as perform practical creative tasks to consolidate the material covered. A podcast is an audio file (audio lecture) that can be listened to online on the Internet or downloaded to a mobile device (desktop computer). Podcasts have great didactic potential in foreign languages’ study due to their authenticity, relevance, versatility, media competence, multi-channel, interactivity, ability to increase motivation and provide an individual approach to learning.

Innovative changes in modern education should lead to the improvement of learning and its results. In this regard, flipped classroom technology has great potential to improve teaching methods, including foreign languages. The flipped classroom is a new teaching method, however, the history of its creation and distribution is quite interesting. A comparative analysis of its main elements with elements of the traditional teaching model shows many significant advantages. However, a detailed scientific description and uniform recommendations for the technique’s using have not yet been developed. In this regard, one should consider opportunities of the flipped classroom in teaching foreign languages to students. This technology allows one escape the frontal teaching form in the classroom, transferring the theory to the student’s independent work at home, at the same time providing an opportunity for a thorough and comprehensive study of the topic. The scientific literature presents a large amount of evidence obtained as a result of experimental work, which indicates the fact that the flipped classroom method contributes to the effective development of students’ listening skills when learning a foreign language, which is especially useful for taking a listening test such as TOEFL. The majority of students demonstrate a positive attitude towards their learning experience using the flipped classroom, noting its advantages such as practical autonomy, increased motivation for learning, and improvement of teaching materials. However, there are also some technical problems in the implementation of the flipped classroom; in particular, technical training is required for using the new technology by teachers and students. At the same time, in scientific research on this issue, control groups are often absent; variables such as motivation and learning strategies are not taken into account. Research with different learner groups, contexts and foreign language learning skills remains highly sought after to provide a broader perspective on the implementation of the new technology.

3. The formation of listening skills using podcasts in teaching foreign languages significantly increases, as evidenced by the results of specialized scientific research. At the same time, nowadays more experiments are required in this area, so that later it would be possible to develop on their basis complex methods of developing listening skills among students studying a foreign language in linguistic and non-linguistic universities. The function of a simple search and revision of the passed material greatly facilitates the process of assimilating information and allows one to obtain comprehensive knowledge in a particular area. It becomes obvious that there are a number of educational situations in which the flipped classroom is not able to fully realize itself. For example, in a situation where the content requires thorough analysis, additional explanations and is too difficult for independent study.

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