Audio books

I have introduced Librivox on this blog. It's a very useful site because it provides the audio and text of many books for free.  However, it can be a little bit difficult to figure out how to find books on it that interest you. In this respect, I think Books Should Be Free is very useful. Most of the audio books on this site are Librivox recordings but the organization of the site is easier to understand. Also, Books Should Be Free provides an "Audio book preview" function that makes it very easy to check the quality of the recording and narration before you download a book:

Books Should Be Free also makes it very easy to find the text for each book.

Another site I would like to introduce is LoudLit.org. "Lit" in the title means "literature." The "About" part of the website says "LoudLit.org is committed to delivering public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances." I agree that the sound quality and the quality of the reading performances are very good. Librivox has some very good recordings but some are not very good. LoudLit.org is much more consistent in presenting high-quality audio books. The number of books, however, is smaller. Another feature of LoudLit.org that I think is very nice is the Read & Listen function. (Click on the link to try it out.)

Finally, verkaro.org also provides very high quality recordings. Unfortunately, verkaro.org does not provide links to the texts that they have recorded but you should be able to find all of the texts on the web if you search for the titles.

British Council

The other day I found that the British Council publishes stories with text and high-quality audio on their website.  Click here to read and listen to a story called "Scarlett."

NPR

Those of you who are interested in listening to news in English should check out the NPR website.  "NPR" stands for "National Public Radio."  You can read the news programs and also listen to the audio.  There are several different ways to listen to the audio.  First, you can listen through your computer's browser by clicking a button that looks like this:

 Second, you can download the audio as an MP3 file and then either play it on your computer or put it in an MP3 player that you can carry with you.  Right click on the download arrow to get the file.

Third, NPR also lets you listen to many of their programs as podcasts.  Click here to look at the NPR podcast directory.

Your grades

Most of you need to do more work to get a good grade in this class. I will give you credit for the work that you do until the end of this month.

There are three kinds of work that you can do online to get credit for this class: blogging, Lang-8, and EnglishCentral. Be sure to send me an e-mail to toward the end of January to ask about your grade. In your e-mail, explain what you have done this semester and how much time you have spent doing it. In order to get a good grade in this class, you need to convince me that you have spent an average of two hours or more per week studying for this class.

I look forward to hearing from you!