IELTS students can practice their listening with our ESL podcasts. These are mp3 files you can download and put on any mp3 player like an ipod, or you can listen to on your computer. These podcasts are also completely free. The reason why these are great listening practice for IELTS students is that they are based on real conversations from native speakers. In each podcast, vocabulary and phrases for daily conversation are discussed in a fun and clear way.

Along with each podcast you can find written material with the key vocabulary and explanations. Practicing for the IELTS exam can be difficult if you don’t have access to any listening material from native speakers. Watching movies or TV in English can be helpful, but often learners of English don’t understand a lot of the slang, and the speed is too fast. Also, the vocabulary and phrases aren’t explained.

The podcasts offered on this website are aimed for students that really want to learn phrases and vocabulary actually spoken by English speakers. They are fun and should help any learner of English improve their spoken and listening abilities. If you practice listening everyday, your ability to communicate in English should greatly improve. All of the lessons and podcasts can be easily found from Lessons . We recommend that you start with podcast 1 and then go through them in order. You can choose any lesson but it should be easier to start with podcast 1 since we use some of our old vocabulary in later lessons. We try and explain most terms again and again so you don’t forget though so feel free to try any lesson you like!

Let us know what you think, and if you have any suggestions in helping you improve your listening skills for the IELTS examination.  If you are unsure on what a podcast is and how you can use it, look at the explanation below.

What is the difference between a podcast and an mp3?
People are often confused about the difference between a podcast and an mp3.  A podcast is an mp3 that you can download.  However what makes the mp3 an actual “podcast” is if the mp3 file has an rss feed,  so you can download it automatically.  Ok, I realize this is a bit confusing still, but what you should know now is that a podcast is an mp3 file that can be automatically downloaded.  How the mp3 can be automatically downloaded will be explained next.

How can I automatically download the mp3 podcast?

This can be done through the RSS feed of the podcast.  Without getting too technical, an rss feed is really just a list of files that can be automatically downloaded.  The feed has a website address just like any website, usually with an ending of .rss or .xml.  Now, to get the podcast to be automatically downloaded, you can put this “feed address” into any feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader. This feed reader is a free program or tool that can easily be found for free from search engines.  A very popular one for podcasts is Itunes, as it also has a list of podcasts to search from.  In other feed readers, all you need to do is copy the location of the rss feed, and then paste it into the feed reader.  You will subscribe to them and when new podcasts become available they can be automatically downloaded to your mp3 player or computer.  It really sounds more confusing than it really is.  Hopefully you will now be able to download the ESL podcasts and start practicing your listening for the IELTS examination!

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