Teaching Resource: Bomb English

Michael Hurt (the Metropolitician), Jennifer, and Yunji have come together to create 폭탄영어, or Bomb English, a free podcast for students of the language in a way that strives to be actually interesting and avoiding condescending to students. They provide a 30-minute talk show on a weekly basis with full transcription for students who wish to read along. Their first topic beyond introductions was President-elect Lee Myeong-bak’s new policy on English Education.

It’s basically an English “talk show” with a different topic each week, with a full transcript available for download with each episode. The idea is that there’s a lot of English “conversation” on the TV and radio that is just plain useless or insulting to one’s intelligence as a thinking adult. There’s some good stuff for sure, but there isn’t much oomph! in terms of the content of the discussions.

And for those of you who teach English conversation out there, feel free to let us do some of the work for you. Use our conversations and transcripts as supplementary material for your class, or make them the jumping off point for your own discussions, with our conversation as a start.

A very welcome proposal for many, I’m sure. So what’s the catch? Why are they doing this? It seems there are some ulterior motives:

In the big picture, we want a voice for foreigners in this society. Traditional media won’t listen to us, it talks about us in prejudiced ways while we can’t offer any reply. So we made our own media.

Also, it’s kind of an experiment as well. We want to show that English can be taught effectively and without condescending to the students, and that language should be a tool of COMMUNICATION, not mere STUDY. So, when speaking English, you should actually SAY SOMETHING INTERESTING.

We think the timing is also right for something like this, and Koreans are ready for something different. This is the age of UCC, of real “user-created content.” The days of everything being generic and controlled by the broadcast media and big companies are ending.
And we want to be among the first to prove that point.

If you can’t beat ‘em, make your own field, and invite everyone to play there for free. If you build it, and build it well, maybe the people will indeed come. The quality of the audio is excellent, the speed of the discussion very reasonable and it seems that the whole thing is quite well thought out. I’m considering using it in my classes this semester, although I may wait until there is a full course’s worth of material before depending on it. Either way, it looks very promising, and it’s worth checking out.

Tagged as: blog, education, foreigners, free, good, korea, language, students