Podcast and Languages Learning

Have you ever heard about podcast? What is podcast? Podcast is seems like an audio and video blog or internet audio files. Podcast is an acronym from the word of “i-pod” and “broadcast”. From those two words, we can see that Podcast is like a media or tool to publish and offer audio and video materials inside. It’s allowing the users to create and get the audio files inside. For example, for honing pronunciation skills, we also can access, listen, download, or may create it by using podcast. Podcast also can be played to a computer or mp3/mp4 player. In brief, podcast is a very useful media or tool which publishes audio or video files that can be downloaded an uploaded by the people online.

How can Podcasting be useful for learning languages?

Like I have said before that podcast is a media or tool to publish audio or video files, it means that it will very useful for learning languages, especially listening and speaking skills. Podcast is an attractive media to improve pronunciation in language learning. Anyone can access and create podcast using a computer or software program. Podcasts can be downloaded and played to a computer or MP3 player. So then, we can download an audio about pronunciation there or listen it well. Podcast also useful to learn languages, because it’s simple to create, publish, edit, and listen. So, it will make our learning becomes easier. Then, it can be used to distribute lecture material in learning languages. Besides, according to Stanley and Meng, podcasting can empower students by giving them opportunities to create and publish for a real audience and facilitate recording and distributing news broadcasts, creating or listening to teachers’ notes, recording lectures distributed directly to students’ MP3 players, supporting student interviews, and providing oral history archiving. From those, we can see that podcast is very useful media to improve language learning which can be used by every students or teachers.