Hi this is Russell Stannard from Teachertrainingvideos.com
I'm still not in my office I'm still working abroad in Turkey I'm making a quick video for you
where I'm going to show you one of my favourite websites for listening comprehension content in
English this is absolutely brilliant because it's video based content it's got subtitles and it's
got a couple of other really useful features and the most important thing it's free and whenever
i show it to teachers and students they really like it hope you like the video if you do please
like it please share it with other teachers and of course please comment on it i'd love to know which
feature you like the best let's get started okay so this is quite a quick video it's worth sitting
back and watching the whole thing because I'm going to show you all the features and you'll very
quickly get to see how useful this can be both for teachers and for students the website is called
voicetube.com when you come onto the uh channel the best thing probably to do first is to click
on the levels because you can immediately access content at different levels what we
do is we'll choose b1 so if you click here on b1 immediately you're going to get a whole series
of videos that you can access and use either in the class or encourage your students to use
so let's just take one of the videos we'll click on this one here about procrastination because I'm
a real procrastinator so the video comes onto the screen and immediately you can see that
you've got the video on the left hand side and on the right hand side you've got the subtitles
and this is really useful so first thing to note is that you can turn the subtitles on and off
now note that when you play the video the subtitles actually show on the screen and they're
kind of marked which makes it really nice let's just watch that in action so i click on the video
day where you nailed all the items on your to-do list and you felt so accomplished and so proud a
day later despite knowing how great it feels to knock out your work so if you notice as you're
going through the video it's kind of marking here now the really interesting thing is that
if you click on any of these subtitles it will actually play that part of the video
now one of my favourite features is this I can actually click
on the subtitles and it will play that part of the video so if I click here for example
it's important to understand that procrastinating is human nature and those who achieve top results
in college and medical school aren't so I really like that power that you can actually kind of
play any part and listen to it again and you know I'm studying polish at the moment and I
really wish that we had this in polish it would be wonderful so if you come down here and you
click on repeat sentence I'm just going to show you this feature so if I click on that button
to set it to on and then I play the video instead of continually playing the video it will play that
one sentence again and again so if you really want to get a particular sentence right
you want to hear the pronunciation then this is ideal let me just show you that in action
one of the hottest musical stars my next guest is no joke one of the hottest musical stars my
next guest is no joke so you can do that just by clicking on that button there that repeat
sentence button and I think that's a really nice feature particularly along with the fact that you
can see the text highlighted on the screen just a super quick break from the video just to say if
you like the video and you want more videos like this please come over to Teachertrainingvideos.com
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and the blogs and the online courses and the webinars that i run as well let's jump back now to
the video if you click over here on the left hand side as well you've got click on channels notice
that you can sort of search via a topic now a lot of the time these days we like to teach through
topics rather than teaching from a particular level or grammar point and so this is really
nice so let's say for example I was interested in the area of leisure and travel then I could click
here and then I'm going to get a whole selection of videos related to that particular topic
another feature to point out is this ability to slow the speed of the video down now
I must admit that I ended up using this quite a lot when I studied polish um I'm going to click
on it and sort of exaggerate it a little bit so you can see so I've set it to 0.5 so only half
speed let's play the video and just have a look what happens I could play Mozart on the piano well
you might just be a child prodigy okay prodigy not bad actually sometimes i think that can
actually be quite helpful when working with video content and particularly if you want to get the
pronunciation right and follow now one comment to make about this website occasionally of course
the subtitles are not correct sometimes it's very difficult to do subtypes when subtitles
when they're linked to the actual script that a person has been saying particularly if it's very
natural spontaneous speech but generally I've been very pleased with the standard um I've had similar
experiences in the stuff that I work on in polish it is obviously a slight risk when you're working
with content from a channel like this but overall I think that the benefits of what this channel
offers and certainly I've shared this channel with many many students and recommended that they
learn to make use of it so there are a few other features on this website and I'll just point out
a couple of things I'm not going to go into them in detail I don't use them so much myself but
there is for example a search vocabulary section where you can write in and search
for a particular word and then find examples of that word in videos where it's being used
could be a nice feature it's not one that I've really made much use of
there is also here as well a kind of pronunciation challenge which I've not looked at at all now what
I've tended to do with this website is introduce it in my lessons get my students to understand
that it exists that it's free that they can make use of it and then really encourage them
to kind of explore and work with it this is a sort of website that could be really good for
independent learning okay hope you found that video useful love to know in the comments
which feature you like the best on that website i find that website pretty impressive uh please come
over to teachertrainingvideos.com loads of free content to access there's all different types of
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of course you can also contact me on my YouTube channel and if you was hoping to ask me to do some
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me from the website and on the screen now I'm just going to put a couple of
other videos that you might find interesting with language learning content thank you very much