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Graham’s presentation last week at Blogstreams Salon on Podcasting in EFL inspired me to give podcasting a try with my own students here in Kyoto. Taking a cue from Bob and Rob, and a pointer from Charles Kelly to David Battino’s java-based popup mp3 player, away I went.

My first step was to call up my good friend Mark White, the Hindu poet. So armed with a mic, Audacity, and a few Asahi reds, we set out to record conversations, some of which were scripted, while others were freestyle riffs on themes like money, love, work, etc. The script we chose to start off with is called Hiromi’s Trip to Thailand, a 36-episode work written by Mark and used in his EFL classes as part of a guided story series to promote learner-centered conversation. We recorded the first 4 episodes and will be posting them over the next few weeks at English Conversations.

In episode 5, Hiromi goes through immigration in Bangkok, so we need a Thai speaker. It would be most interesting to locate someone in Thailand who uses Skype and will allow us to record their voice using Steve Dembo’s method of recording Skype calls on a Mac, which is easy to do and works well. For now, we will rely on a local Thai contact.

We plan to experiment with different approches to podcasting in EFL/ESL, including recording international conference calls, story telling, poetry readings, use of controversial and taboo topics, on the fly recordings with transcriptions, etc. Constructive feedback on the podcasts as learning resources warmly appreciated.