BRITISH SERIES

THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF RECOMMENDED SERIES TO IMPROVE YOUR LISTENING COMPREHENSION. YOU CAN EASILY FIND THEM ON THE NET, TO WATCH ONLINE OR DOWNLOAD.

THE NUMBER OF STARS NEXT TO THE TITLE INDICATES THE DIFFICULTY FOR UPPER-INTERMEDIATE AND ADVANCED STUDENTS. 
* NO SUBTITLES RECOMMENDED
** YOU MAY USE SUBTITLES OR NOT
*** THE LEVEL OF LANGUAGE OR THE ACCENTS MAY REQUIRE SUBTITLES

FEEL FREE TO RECOMMEND ANY SERIES OF YOUR CHOICE FOR ME TO ADD TO THE SELECTION, BY LEAVING A COMMENT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE.
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COUPLING (COMEDY) **

A sitcom written by Steven Moffat that aired on BBC2 in May 2000 and ended with the fourth season in June 2004. It centres on the dating life and sexual adventures and mishaps of six British friends in their thirties, often depicting the three women and the three men each talking among themselves about the same events, but in entirely different terms. 

The centre of the story are a couple formed by the main characters Steve and Susan. The four other characters are Steve and Susan's best friends and last ex-relationships (one of each for both Steve and Susan); they represent the extremes of confidence and paranoia between the sexes when it comes to relationships. The two main characters have to negotiate their own relationship surrounded by these extremes. The critical reaction was largely positive, and the show was named "Best TV Comedy" at the 2003 British Comedy Awards.

DOWNTON ABBEY (PERIOD DRAMA) ***

season 1

season 2

season 3

Set in the fictional Downton Abbey, the Yorkshire country house of the Earl and Countess of Grantham, this series follows the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants during the reign of King George V. 

The first season spans the two years before the Great War beginning with news of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, which sets the story in motion. The second season covers the years 1916 to 1920. Much of the focus is on the need for a male heir to the Grantham estate, and the troubled love life of Lady Mary as she attempts to find a suitable husband. 

Season 2 begins with the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the family has to learn how to live in a new world that's constantly changing. Matthew Crawley, Thomas Barrow, and William Mason must go to fight in the war; Tom Branson, an Irishman, will not fight for the British. Lady Sybil Crawley defies her aristocratic position and joins the Voluntary Aid Detachment. The season ends with a Christmas episode that pictures life in Downton between Christmas 1919 and early 1920.

Series 3 opens in 1920 and covers a year and a half, in which we can see the main characters recovering from the war and adpting to a new order of things and a radical change in society. Academy Award-winning American actress Shirley MacLaine joins the cast as Martha Levinson, Cora's mother.

GAVIN AND STACEY (COMEDY) ***

season 1

season 2

Gavin & Stacey is a sitcom that follows the long-distance relationship of Gavin from Essex, England, and Stacey from the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. The series is highly advisable if your level of oral comprehension is quite good as there are some characters with difficult accents.

The writers of the show, actors James Corden and Ruth Jones, also co-star as Gavin and Stacey's friends Smithy and Nessa. Gavin & Stacey was acclaimed as a hit breakthrough show for BBC Three, becoming the most nominated show in the 2007 British Comedy Awards.

SHERLOCK (CRIME INVESTIGATION) **

Sherlock is a British television crime drama that presents a modern approach based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective stories. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson. Six episodes, broadcast since 2010, have been produced, with three more episodes scheduled to begin production in early 2013. 

The show was conceived by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. They wanted to produce a modern-day version of Conan Doyle's stories in which Sherlock uses the technologies that are available to him today in order to find things out and solve crimes.

Sherlock is kind of a "consulting detective", assisting the Metropolitan Police Service, primarily DI Greg Lestrade, in solving various crimes. Holmes is assisted by his flatmate, Dr John Watson, who has returned from military service in Afghanistan. Although the series depicts a variety of crimes and perpetrators, Holmes' conflict with his nemesis Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) is a recurring feature. 

WHITECHAPEL (CRIME INVESTIGATION) **

season 1

season 2

season 3

A fast-tracked inspector, a hardened detective sergeant, and an expert in historical homicides investigate modern crimes with connections to the past in the Whitechapel district of London. 

The first season begins with fast-tracker DI Jospeh Chandler being posted to Whitechapel by Commander Anderson in order to lead the investigation into the murder of a woman, as the final step before promotion. Chandler's superiors are very concerned that London may have a Jack the Ripper copycat. They tell Chandler he is on his own and that he must solve this case quickly. 

The second season begins with a dead body discovered floating in the Thames, and a series of horrific attacks follow which appear to echo the Kray twins' infamous crimes of the 1960's. 

In the third series of Whitechapel, gruesome crimes summon up screaming and restless ghosts of the past and it's up to Chandler's team to decipher their historic relevance in order to piece together the clues of modern day crimes.

SOURCE: Sandra Alvarez's Blog

AMERICAN SERIES

THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF RECOMMENDED SERIES TO IMPROVE YOUR LISTENING COMPREHENSION. YOU CAN EASILY FIND THEM ON THE NET, TO WATCH ONLINE OR DOWNLOAD.

THE NUMBER OF STARS NEXT TO THE TITLE INDICATES THE DIFFICULTY FOR UPPER-INTERMEDIATE AND ADVANCED STUDENTS. 

* NO SUBTITLES RECOMMENDED
** YOU MAY USE SUBTITLES OR NOT
*** THE LEVEL OF LANGUAGE OR THE ACCENTS MAY REQUIRE SUBTITLES

FEEL FREE TO RECOMMEND ANY SERIES OF YOUR CHOICE FOR ME TO ADD TO THE SELECTION, BY LEAVING A COMMENT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE.
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BREAKING BAD (THRILLER) ***

season 1

season 4

Breaking Bad is an American television drama series created and produced by Vince Gilligan. Set and produced in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a struggling high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the beginning of the series. He breaks bad, that is to day, he turns to a life of crime, producing and selling methamphetamine with a former student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), with the aim of securing his family's financial future before he dies.

Breaking Bad has received widespread critical acclaim. The series has won seven Primetime Emmy Awards—including three consecutive wins for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Cranston, two wins for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Paul, and three nominations for Outstanding Drama Series. 


Vince Gilligan wanted to create a series in which the protagonist became the antagonist. "Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades," he said. "When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change.

CASTLE (POLICE DRAMA)

DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES (DRAMA)

GAME OF THRONES (MEDIEVAL FANTASY) ***

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season 2

An American medieval fantasy television series created for HBO by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. It is an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin's series of fantasy novels, the first of which is titled A Game of Thrones.

The series, set in the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, interweaves several plot lines. The first follows the members of several noble houses in a civil war for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms; the second covers the rising threat of the impending winter and the mythical creatures of the North; the third chronicles the attempts of the exiled last scion of the realm's deposed dynasty to reclaim the throne. Through its morally ambiguous characters, the series explores issues of social hierarchy, religion, civil war, sexuality, crime and punishment.

Game of Thrones is the most recent big-budget work to have contributed to the popularity of the fantasy genre in mainstream media. It has become the most watched original series on HBO since The Sopranos, and numerous references in the media and other works of entertainment reflect the mark it has left on the public imagination.

FRIENDS (SITUATION COMEDY)

FRINGE (SCIENCE FICTION)

GREY'S ANATOMY (MEDICAL DRAMA)

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (COMEDY)

LOST (DRAMA AND SCIENCE-FICTION)**

season 1

season 2 

Lost is an American television series that was originally aired on ABC from 2004 to 2010, consisting of six seasons. Lost is a drama series containing elements of science fiction and the supernatural that follows the survivors of the crash of a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney and Los Angeles, on a mysterious tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean.

The story is told in a heavily serialized manner. Episodes typically feature a primary storyline on the island, as well as a secondary storyline from another point in a character's life. Due to its large ensemble cast and the cost of filming primarily on location in Oahu, Hawaii, the series was one of the most expensive on television. 

A critically acclaimed and popular success, Lost was consistently ranked by critics on their lists of top ten series of all time. During its sixth and final season, the show averaged over 11 million US viewers per episode. Lost was the recipient of hundreds of award nominations throughout its run, and won numerous industry awards, including the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2005.

The first season begins with a plane crash that strands the surviving passengers of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 on what seems to be a deserted tropical island. Their survival is threatened throughout the season by a number of mysterious entities, including polar bears, an unseen creature that roams the jungle (the "Smoke Monster"), and the island's malevolent, and largely unseen, inhabitants known as "the Others". They encounter a French woman named Danielle Rousseau who was shipwrecked on the island 16 years prior to their crash. They also find a mysterious metal hatch buried in the ground. While two characters try to force their way into the hatch, four other survivors attempt to leave the island on a raft that they have constructed. Meanwhile, flashbacks centered on individual survivors detail their lives prior to the plane crash.

PERSON OF INTEREST (POLICE DRAMA)

REVENGE (DRAMA)

THE BIG BANG THEORY (COMEDY)

THE WIRE (POLICE THRILLER)

TREME (DRAMA)

SOURCE: Sandra Alvarez's Blog

Disruptive and Transformative Education: Designing learning in the digital age

The Internet is changing how and when people can access information and is transforming and disrupting how education is designed and delivered. New approaches to learning are threatening traditional educational values by de-institutionalizing and de-formalizing education as we know it. These new approaches support the prediction that education is as "susceptible to tech disruption as other information-centric industries such as the news media, magazines and journals, encyclopedias, music, motion pictures and television [1]."

The New Media Consortium's global digital educational meta-trends highlight some of the disruptive changes already happening in education[2], such as:

• Emerging global and collaborative educational business models of whatever, whenever and wherever learning.
• Creating and consuming rich media through mobile and cloud-based delivery, which is refining our notion of literacies.
• Acknowledging the role of informal and self-directed learning, which is redefining who can accredit educational experiences.
• Increasing openness of content, data and resources, and changing practices for online ownership and privacy.

Examples of Anywhere, Anytime, Anyhow Education

Freely available online education courses, such as university and corporate led massive open online courses (MOOCs), and the ability to access open educational resources (OER) through open courseware (OCW), the coalition of Open Educational Resource Universities (OERu) or the Peer 2 Peer University (P2P,) are providing greater choice of when, where, and how people learn.

Formal educational institutions are adopting more synchronous and asynchronous collaborative approaches to learning through readily available tools such wikis, blogs, and cloud services such as Google Drive, and Dropbox. This is enabling learners to connect across the planet.

Acknowledging and Supporting Pro-sumer Learners

Learners are now multi-connected, multi-deviced, and live in an app driven world. This means designing learning that is interactive and available anytime/anywhere. This needs to take into account the necessity in allowing learners to easily access their learning materials and experiences via mobile BYO devices (BYODs) such as mobile phones and tablets.

Educators can take advantage of their connected learners by encouraging them to capture evidence of their formal, non-formal, and informal learning experiences on the run. Live streaming these experiences into their life-streams on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter or into the personal electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) and data stores means learners are now producing and consuming information online making them "pro-sumers."

Open or Digital Badges are offering an alternative way of acknowledging a person's current skills, knowledge, and experiences, and can be issued by anyone for anything. Learners can then "hang" these badges on their e-portfolios or websites to validate who they are and what they can do.

Curating the Learning

Knowledge has no end point, therefore learners should not be held back by the slowest learner in the group. This way of thinking is seeing an increased use of the data, which learning technologies and the Web generate as individuals interact with it. Free online education services like the Khan Academy are using what is known as learning analytics to provide a window into learners' progress. This data mining is changing education business models from the delivery of education to the facilitation of learning.

Educators are also becoming learning resource curators and education change agents. This is allowing a flipped "personalized" approach to education while enabling learners to develop the skills they need for managing their own lifelong learning.

Being a digital curator and creator means both the educator and the learner need to better understand online ownership requirements. Intellectual property of resources and information can be openly self-asserted using the Creative Commons licences.

By accessing and using cloud storage and services, everyone needs a general understanding of managing their privacy and information online, as well as managing digital sovereignty implications for their organizations and their learners.

Educators as Self-directed Learners

The use of technology in education adds a new domain of knowledge for educators who now need to blend their specialist content and pedagogical knowledge for the online world. Known as technical, pedagogical, content knowledge or TPCK, educators need to ensure they are developing skills in all of these areas to be able to design effective digital learning. Using online learning communities or "circles" and personal learning networks (PLNs), educators need to not only learn from, but be able to learn with, online TPCK enabled-peers through professional online dialogue and activity.

These emerging global digital educational meta-trends highlight that educators need to be at the forefront of how to best use the Internet, and how to be think about new and transformative ways of teaching and facilitating learning. Educators themselves also need to keep learning about new and innovative ways technologies can be used to not only enhance their learners' experiences and lifelong learning skills, but to also facilitate their own ongoing development. Those educators not taking this lead will be doing a disservice to their learners who need to be able to work and live in an ever-increasing complex and digital world.

References

[1] Anderson, J., Boyles, J. L., and Rainie, L. The Future of Higher Education. Pew Internet. July 27, 2012. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Higher-Education.aspx

[2] Horizon Project Retreat Communiqué. New Media Consortium. 2012.http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-Horizon-Project-Retreat-Communique.pdf

About the Author

Allison Miller has been involved in education and training for nearly 20 years as an educator, professional development, and eLearning leader. Miller is the Director and Principal Consultant of Vanguard Visions Consulting, a learning and development (L&D) consultancy, which specializes in cutting edge e-solutions and research services which improve businesses' performance and digital capability. She also supports national eLearning projects for the National VET E-learning Strategy, and is the manager of the national professional network, ePortfolios Australia, and the international Digital Capability - Doing it Smarter online community.

© 2012 ACM 1535-394X/12/11 $15.00
DOI: 10.1145/2398996.2398997

Source: elearnMagazine

Listen to English

Welcome to Listen to English, the podcast website for people learning English.

The podcasts on this site will help you to improve your English vocabulary and pronunciation and your listening skills. They are quite short (5 or 6 minutes) and delivered in clearly spoken English. Many of them are linked to grammar and vocabulary notes, or to exercises or quizes.

You can download the podcasts to your computer, or subscribe using iTunes or Yahoo, or listen to them by clicking the Flash player on the web page at the top of each episode. If you like, we can send you an e-mail every time a new podcast goes on air.

You can put the podcasts onto your iPod, Smart Phone or MP3 player, and listen to them on your way to school or work. The full text of each podcast is on this site (and will also appear on your iPod screen), so you can look up the meanings of words that you do not understand in a dictionary. Then close your eyes and listen! Have fun!

We have been making podcasts for English learners since 2006. There are over 200 podcast recordings on this website for you to explore.

Our newest podcast is Mid-life Crisis posted on 22 December 2012.

Listen to English podcasts are completely free. The costs of recording and of hosting this website are met by the advertisements in the left-hand side of each webpage. Please support the companies who advertise on Listen to English

Link: Listen to English

deepenglish blog

We like to share interesting stories, news, and ideas with you. We try to make them easy to understand. We use text, images, audio, and video, so you can listen, read, and watch your way to better English.

Link: deepenglish

Before we talk about improving you pronunciation, I have a question for you. What did English sound like before you learned English? Did it sound completely alien? Did it sound like nonsense? Maybe this post will help you remember:
How to improve your pronunciation: Shadowing technique

Hear The 2012 National Book Award Nominees

Publishers, reporters and authors gathered Tuesday at the New School in New York City to celebrate this year's exceptional nominees for the National Book Awards. In advance of the awards on Wednesday night, NPR recorded the 10 nominated authors for fiction and nonfiction reading from their works.

These 10 books — which tell the stories of a young drug smuggler, lovable philanderers, holograms in the Saudi desert, and more — inspired, informed and entertained readers in 2012.

Hear two winners — Louise Erdrich and Katherine Boo — and eight finalists as they read from some of the year's best books.
Listen here.

I will survive. Thanksgiving

THANKSGIVING

The top titles of 2012

BOOKS OF THE YEAR: ANNA CAREY asks writers, poets, historians, comedians, politicians, broadcasters, an editor and a bookshop owner to nominate their favourites.

Read more here.