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Five great advanced level French listening sites

If your A-level students would like opportunities to practise listening there are plenty of sources you can recommend for accessible, largely comprehensible and interesting material. Here are some I have come across while searching for resources over recent years.

Daily Geek Show

I love this site. It's fresh, youthful and full of really interesting material. They have an archive of videos, both short and long, from various sources, grouped under a range of themes: insolite (weird news items), science, discovery, technology, ecology and lifestyle. There should be something there to interest all your students while adding to their broader education. Here is one I enjoyed (I shall seriously think about buying tomatoes in winter now):




France Bienvenue

This site has been around for years and is the work of a university team in Marseilles. You get a mixture of audio and video material complete with transcripts and explanations.This is much more about the personal lives of the students at the university in that particular year. A great chance to hear authentic language and voices. the level is relatively easy and could even be used with intermediate students. An example:



Les conversations mises à jour

These discussions are from the lovely people at the University of Austin, Texas, who do superb work on language teaching and training. This is how they describe them:

"Les Conversations Mises à Jour is a collection of authentic conversations in French that targets mostly intermediate and advanced learners of French. Each conversation highlights the shared experience of two native or near-native French speakers and provides both an oral history of that experience and a trove of cultural references."

Ilini

You can subscribe to the Ilini site for premium features, but the free stuff is very good. Topics are chosen to match with exam topics from the A-level French specifications. The videos are taken from French TV, are short and well chosen for the target audience. Transcripts are available. Here is a demo of the site.




TV5 Monde

This has been a go-to site for years. You can search video clips by level (Common European Framework) and topic. To give you a taste of TV5 Monde, here is an interview with Justin Trudeau.



So, if ever a student asks you; "How do I revise listening?" I would say just do it as much as possible. You can't beat a bit of comprehensible input.

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