Are you forever looking for fun material for listening to practice English with your students and you don’t know what websites to use? I’m still always looking for new websites for listening practice in English, but the following ones are my favorites. They are great, no matter the level of proficiency of your students, and most offer exercises that go with the material too.
Do you also get frustrated with the inauthentic audio or video fragments that you’re encouraged to use as part of your textbook? I know I am! My students and I have to laugh about it each time we are listening to a super awkward and forced exchange between two people that does not sound natural at all. Sometimes there will be some added-in background noise to make it sound better, but mostly it’s just weird. Feel the same way? Well, let me tell you what I do for listening practice!
Wanna know how I plan a listening lesson around any spoken or audio text I want my students to listen to? Check out my free Lush Listening Lesson Cheat Sheet here!
Websites for listening practice in English
What I like to do is get some authentic materials for my students to listen to. This is going to help them hear real pronunciation of English in an authentic setting. It’s much more interesting for students to do listening practice that way and better for their fluency overall, I think. That’s why the next few websites – save from the first one – offer those types of materials.
Learn English Teens from the British Council is a wonderful website for teaching resources in general. They have resources for all the skills, which they divide into levels of the CEFR, so that makes it easy to search audio or video that’s appropriate for your students. And they include worksheets as well, which can be printed, as well as used online. Not all materials are super authentic, but you can look for those that are. This website is great for listening practice for ESL students because of these clear level markers.
Listening practice of English with the news
Newsround is a news broadcast for young children in the UK, so you’ll have to check what your students would be able to handle. The episodes may be listening practice ESL students will find too hard, but I find I can use them for my 12 to 14-year-olds, as it will be difficult enough yet also interesting enough for them. It’s a really good resource for staying up to date on the news, which is something I find very important.
CNN10 is a listening website for your older kids. It’s the news explained in 10 minutes, and told in an easier way than for adults, but your students need to be quite proficient. Check which of your students could handle this beforehand; I found it worked well for my 15+ students. They really enjoy it though, because it feels like they’re being taken seriously.
Fun listening stuff too
Ted Ed uses Ted Talks and converts them into usually short, animated videos. You can search the website according to student level and video duration, as well as subject. There’s a huge variety of subjects available. And then these videos also contain lessons, which contain questions, additional resources to explore, and discussion questions. TedEd is one of my favorite listening websites when I want something that is both engaging and very interesting for students.
National Geographic Kids also has a lot of cool videos on their websites. They don’t have lessons, but their videos are fun and there’s a variety of scienc-y topics available. There’s a great chance you’ll find something your younger kids will enjoy. I always get my students to come up with questions for each other, which they enjoy a lot.
So there you have it: five awesome websites for listening practice. Click the pictures to visit these websites and see if you like them!
I recently wrote a blog post about how to structure a good listening skills lesson, which you can find HERE. Check it out for some tips on how to use any audio or video resources in your lessons.
Ready-made listening exercises
These are the websites I use to do listening to practice English with students. And if you’re looking for exercises to use with any of the video you find on these websites (that don’t already include exercises), check out these. I’ve made a set of pre-listening, during listening, and after listening exercises that can be used for any type of spoken text, video or audio. They are ready to go, and my students really enjoy working on them! I will give them as homework sometimes too, and students can use their own spoken text of choice, like a Netflix show or movie.
Related articles:
How to make listening practice fun with YouTube
Why using podcasts is great for listening skills practice
3 Responses
Thank you so much for providing all the great websites! I would like to share another free website with listening exercises featuring 8 different audio accents.
https://myenglishtutorial.com
That’s a great suggestion! Thank you!