Geoff’s EFL Blog

So, Melanie’s podcast TBRCP0004 – GO5 class talk about Oxford nightlife is out. It was recorded and uploaded on Friday.
http://bardwellroad.podomatic.com/entry/2006-01-27T13_46_13-08_00

She chose to ask her classmates about their experience / opinion of Oxford nightlife. [A little background: It was Melanie's birthday on Thursday, and she went to the Bridge nightclub in Oxford city centre the previous night, as did most of her classmates, and many students in the other classes. Our students are mostly college age, and many enjoy clubbing. The Bridge nightclub has a special evening on Wednesday night, and so Wednesday night is "Bridge night" for a significant number of our students - absenteeism on Thursday morning is a recognised problem.]

I had a task students could get on with, and unlike previous recording sessions, which were done inside the classroom in front of the whole class, we set up my laptop and microphone in a different room, and students came in for an interview one at a time.

We continued after the end of the class: Melanie recorded the “outro” and chose a piece of music (from Apple’s Garageband selection), and I started editing the podcast, showing her how easy it was to delete unwanted bits of noise, silences, fluffed first takes and so on, to make the production seem more professional, and to make the interviewees sound more fluent and articulate than they really were, and also how I was going to use the music to punctuate the different sections of the podcast. [I finished off the editing later on, but it wasn't until evening, at home, that I found time to encode the audio as an mp3 file, upload it, and produce the show notes. I had to adjust audio levels a bit for different speakers, as they varied quite widely, due to differences in loudness of speech, and distance from the microphone.]

Melanie did pretty well interviewing people, trying to draw out quiet types – Boyang, for example. Some of the interviews were pretty funny, e.g. when she got a new student from Azerbaijan, Zaur, to admit to spending £100 on a bottle of champagne at the Bridge the night before, and when she got a Saudi Arabian to admit he’d been drinking alcohol! So I was pretty happy with the show.

Again, there was reluctance among the students to be interviewed. Abdulmalik managed to slip away without an interview.

I’d been talking to Penny Larrs, who teaches the GO5 class for their so-called third hour, about the possibility of involving her main class, a higher level class, in a podcast. She talked to GO5 about it in her lesson with them on Friday morning, after they recorded Melanie’s podcast with me, and apparently they are interested. (Cynics would say they were looking forward to not being the ones having to do most of the talking??!) So it looks like a joint effort podcast next week, though questions of form and content are up in the air.