PODCAST IS THE MOST BENEFICIAL WAY OF LEARNING ENGLISH

Shamuratova Shoira Fayzulla qizi

Student of Foreign Language and Literature: English, Department of Urgench State Pedagogical Institute

ANNOTATION: In this article, l am going write about podcasts and their benefits in learning English, l hope that it will be beneficial for all of the people who are learning English or interested in learning English by listening to songs, music, especially podcasts.

The main purpose to write this article to give more information about podcasts and also giving tips to improve listening skills and to find the best podcasts on the lnternet.Furthermore,l really want to help learners to make easier learning English by making fun.

KEY WORDS: Podcast (British Broadcasting Council),smartphones,music, learning languages, Educational tool, Attention span,hormones, flight or fight response.

PODCAST-a radio programme that is stored in a digital form that you can download from the Internet and play on a compeuter or on an MP3 player.

History of the word: This word came from the combination of two words iPods and Broadcast.

When learning English many people choose listening various podcasts in order to improve their English skills.Some people believe that listening Podcasts only help us to enhance our listening skills, however, it has proven that, Not only we can improve our listening skils but we can also easily improve our other skills including, Reading, writing, speaking,communicational skills and social skills that is the most essential part of English and our everyday life.So, maybe the number of listeners icreased significantly over the past 3 years.For inctance, studies show that the number of active podcast listeners was about 464.7 million around the world (in 2013), that makes up around 22% of all Internet users.These numbers have been increasinf by over 40 milion years and maybe it will be a more higher in the future as the interest for listeninf to podcast are increasing day by day. It is predicted that it will be around 504.9 million al around the globe by the end of 2024.

Here, l am going to write a number of key benefits that help us to understand the importance of podcasts.

1.Podcast can stimulate the mental imaginary, it means we know that podcasts include various topics which is interesting and full of meaningful information when we listen the podcast automatically, we imagine or think abour the topic in our mind in order to understand completely.In this process the brain start to work to build pictures and enhace our visual process so that we can easily comprehend what we are hearing.

2.Listening to podcasts will be helpful for the brain.ln other words, they enhance the essential parts of the brain that cause to increase the levels of empathy, relationships and boost compassion. Moreover, hearing the podcast can lead to the brain to release neurotransmitter called oxytocin that is also called ‘love hormone’. This hormone help us to reduce anxiety and stress which cause to improve our attention span when doing their work, this might be only one example that the right genre of podcast to nourish our brain.

3.Podcast as an educational tool.Another major benefit of listening podcast is learning new information cause they help us to take an important data as excellent source of educational material.We can find various podcasts that is always freely available for everyone on some platforms like Youtube and Spotify.Moreover, the topics of the podcast will be different.It also might be other advantage of them

4.Podcast can enhance our concentration and attention span.Many people prefer listening crime-scenes of podcast that causes to release adrenaline in some listeners.It is the main reason to the adrenaline rush that activatate this process and it leads to flight or fight response it means that our body will be more active and alert and also try to engage with our surroundings that support to absorb more information.When we hear the podcasts For instanse, it is about “Environmental problems” we only focus on our attention to the environmental issues (effects, causes, solutions) namely we only think about one issue that help us to improve our attention span.

5.Listening to podcasts give a chance to know others opinions and to change our outlook.One of the main reasons of listening to podcasts to expand our mind, horizon by listening new ideas, opinions and to listen about different experiences that we never normally face in our real life. Thet give an opportunity to see or meet with some people who has similar ideas or interests and also the same job as we.However, live in other country or different corner of the world it means that we can easily find like-minded people within a second without any problem or any difficulties.

Now, l am going to give information about a number podcast apps on Android in 2023.By downloading these apps you can easily find and listen them in everywhere at any time.But, some of them is online.Therefore, l will try to give offline apps also.

1. Pocket casts- is a simply yet multi-faceted podcast app, making it our pick for the best podcast app.lt offers hand-curated podcast suggestions to make it simple matter to discover new podcasts and episodes.ln this app there are different kind of podcast episodes, both new and old, with easy management of our favourite podcasts, we can access them that much faster.Benefits of this app:    a) have extra tools to switch dark to light background b)have different modes like split view, slide over

2.Podbean-This app helps us to earn money by creating, promoting and monetizing our podcast.Therefore, we can easily say that Podbean is an easy and powerful way to create, promote and monetize our podcast.Everything is available that we need in this app.Nowadays, more than 600.00 podcasters trust Podbean in order to create podcast and this app is very important to start our podcast and to achieve goals.This app provides IAB- certified podcast analytics and intuitive charts to help us to measure our success and get insights into our audience.

3.Castbox – This app is availableb on IOS  and Android, supports 50 million podcasts, on demand radio programs, and audiobooks in 70 languages from 175 countries.This app helps us to download and listen to our favourite pocasts(such as The daily) radio and audiobooks.This also give a chance to earn money by creating podcast channels and apply premium channel on Castbox

4.Stitcher- is the easiest way to listen, download and discover podcasts for free across iOS, Android, Web and more. The free version of stitcher gives us access to over 65.000 shows from almost every genre imaginable.Stitchers are pieces of code that are used by different network manager processes.They take information from database, place the information and process it and send the information from one to another.

Here, There are some student’s and teacher’s perceptions towards the use of podcast in learning English.

The topic of podcasts could help educators excite students’ curiosity and interest and eloborate connection between new and previous materials or difficult concepts( lstanto&lndrianti 2011, Ogott & Odera, 2012).

Podcasts help to us to improve our listening skills and our overall language skills( Chen, 2005).

Listening to podcasts give a chance to enhance our concentration skills.(Adler & Lucas, 2013, Hullbert, 1989).

 When listening to podcasts atmospheric condition also affect to the listening performance and how the stimuli were perceived(Zaman&Sidhu, 2013).

There are definetely exact reasons why many people , nowadays, prefer listening to podcasts and they made it a part of their daily routine.lf we want to improve our English skills (IELTS,CEFR) we should listen to more podcast instead of doing other activities and In this article l gave some apps and programs’ names that we can find podcasts easily without any distraction.l think they will be helpful and encourage us to listen more podcast and learn English by listening to music by making fun.

REFERENCE: 1.          Buzzsprout Platform Statistics.(How to start a podcast: Complete step-by- step guide)(2023)

2.Vulture( Podcasts are always the next big thing).

3.Brain and life Magazine( The role of Podcasts as an alternative Media for learning).

4.Articles written by national Institutes (Podcasts:accessing, choosing).

This article was written by Shamuratova Shoira who is the first year student of Urgench State Pedagogical Institute