Listening and Speaking Skills in a Foreign Language: Working with Podcasts

While foreign language learners fear spoken skills stating reasons such as they do not understand anything from what they listen to or they are afraid of making mistakes while speaking, their teachers try to find ways to prevent these negative feelings. Using podcasts is one of the ways the teachers use for this purpose. Aiming to introduce podcasting and to synthesize the ways of using the target language in spoken activities, this descriptive study first describes what podcasting is and it discusses the benefits and the ways of using them in education. Then, it demonstrates how podcasts are used in foreign language speaking and listening activities, and it provides some podcast examples of listening activities for learning French as a foreign language.