Improving your listening by podcasting

A very good way to practice your English listening could be podcasting. The web is now full of this very good audio invention for ESL learners. Why? It is a cheap and efficient way to listen to fresh content based English. You can listen to all these audio recording either in the way or by copying them all to your mp3/ipodcasting player in order to hear them while in the underground or by car in your way to work. The quality of sound is great in most cases and you could find them in many different accents, which is very recommended for you are tourism professionals to be in a very close future.

Here you are some suggestions for you to listen:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Travel (very practical in order to study unit 5, you will see why)

Open University ITunesU (You need to have Itunes software installed)

University of Oxford ITunes (Arts and Humanities)

Tourism, Travel, Geography and Education Podcasts (A very complete compilation of podcasts dealing different fields of tourism, including airplane topics, new destinies, travelling guides, etc.)

Idiotvox-tourism (assorted podcasts dealing with tourism fields, very focussed on education)

Let's talk tourism podcast (Dublin Institute of Technology. Good to revise topics dealing with unit 1)

You will find some of these and others in the right section of this blog.

More suggestions? Opinions about this post? Do you agree with this? Please, use comments to reply.

Google Earth and El Prado Museum

Now there's no need to travel to Madrid in order to admire all the famous masterpieces from El Prado. Thanks to Google Maps, you can do it. To do this activity:

1. Read the following information and give your opinion here about the quality of the images, variety of works presented, etc. After doing that write here using the comments option your opnion about this. Would you recommended? Is is good enough? (Use page 42 from your book to do this in order to describe the advantages and disadvantages of visiting artistic places in a vistual way)

2. Choose a portrait, and try to describe it here (page 106 from your books).

Barajas chaos

Imagine that you have been working these days at Iberia, Barajas airport. You need to calm down many tourist waiting to fly.

Give here possible answers and relaxing messages to all the possible claims done by angry tourists.

Have a look at the following article to read some input on this topic.