How to Learn English with News (featuring Stephen - SEND7)

Hello, and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast, the listening

resource for intermediate to advanced level English learners.

My name is Anna and today we have a very special guest.

Let me introduce Stephen from Simple English News Daily, or rather SEND7.

Hi Stephen, how are you?

I am very well.

Thank you, Anna.

Thank you for having me.

You're very welcome.

Stephen, I did listen to the news this morning, but maybe I should

be listening to your podcast.

How up-to-date is your podcast?

How quickly do you get the news out onto your podcast?

Well, well it is a daily podcast.

So, yeah, Monday to Friday.

Yeah, every day, it's there.

So, yeah, it's not on Saturdays and Sundays, but Monday, Tuesday,

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday it's there.

Fantastic and so, your podcast is all about teaching English through news.

So, let's go back to the very beginning.

How did you get into teaching English?

I always like the origin stories.

Okay.

I was always a language learner myself.

I speak Spanish and French.

I studied them in secondary school.

And after I finished school I went to France for a while,

six months or something.

And then after university, I lived in Spain for a year and travelled the world

in a few different places, lived in Argentina for a couple of years as well.

And yeah, during that time, as well as learning languages,

I was teaching English.

I wasn't always, you know, 100 per cent sure that that's what I

wanted to do, but I just enjoyed it.

So, carried on doing that.

And I was also a primary school teacher in England for the last

three or four years as well.

So, you're back in the UK now.

I am.

You missed the sunny shores of the UK.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's looking incredibly grey and rainy and windy at the moment.

Yes.

The stereotypical English day.

I do miss the sunshine sometimes.

Yeah, when I was in Spain, I was living in Granada, which is in the south.

It's really, really hot during the summer, although it actually gets

quite cold in the winter as well.

And in Argentina, I was living in the North in a place called Resistencia,

which is really, really hot.

Oh right.

Like 40 degrees during the summer.

It's crazy.

So, yeah, it's quite a difference being back in England again.

And when you were teaching, you've recently finished teaching in

primary school, but what were you teaching in primary school?

Were you teaching English there as well, or just a generic

kind of all-round education?

Yeah, I was an all-round primary teacher.

I don't know what it's like exactly in most other countries, but yeah,

in generally in England, primary school teachers just teach everything.

So, English, Maths, Science, maybe you have a different teacher for

PE or music or something, but...

Or drama?

Did you do drama in primary school?

I taught drama.

Yeah.

I was the head of drama.

I was the drama department at a private primary school for a while.

Not far from where I live now, actually.

Yeah.

I enjoyed primary school for the children are fun.

It's a great age.

The primary age they're uninhibited and you know, full of energy, but it

was the paperwork and the politics that I wasn't a fan of, I have to say.

Yeah, nobody likes the paperwork and the politics, but yeah, no, I got

to teach a lot of Spanish as well because I was the only person in

the school who could speak Spanish.

So I was used in a lot of different classes and I pretty

much wrote my own curriculum.

For what the other year groups could be could be learning and that.

Fantastic.

But yeah, yeah, I really enjoyed it.

So, what took you from being in a classroom full of kids and teaching

all-round education to, I'm guessing sitting alone in a room speaking to a

microphone teaching English through news?

How did you make that transition?

You make podcasting sounds so lonely, but sometimes it is, isn't it?

Yeah, it was actually really, I was actually doing them both at

the same time for quite a long time, which was really difficult.

Really, really a lot of work.

But it was mostly because I thought that this idea for a podcast,

Simple English News Daily, Send7, was just a really good idea.

And I thought that people would be really interested in it, because I was

already listening to, not exactly the same thing, but I was already listening

to news podcasts and listening to the radio in French and Spanish myself every

day, you know, and this was kind of, especially since being back in England

and also being in other places where I wasn't speaking Spanish and French.

I wanted to have this kind of connection every day to the languages that I knew.

So, I was often listening to the radio and podcasts, and particularly the news.

And this made me think, I wonder if there is some kind of daily news podcast

which is spoken in a little bit more of an easy way for people with English

as a second language to understand.

And there, there wasn't one.

So, I thought, okay, I'm going to make it myself.

So, you saw a gap in the market, we'd say.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

A total gap in the market.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And of course, it's a pretty crazy thing to do because it's so

much work to do every single day.

But once I started it, it became reasonably popular quite quickly

like it was always growing and I got some really nice feedback.

Lots of people saying that they started listening to it every day when they

were drinking their coffee, you know, or on the, on the train or something.

And it was, it was just great.

So, I thought, yeah, I'm going to keep going.

And yeah, only last July, I changed, left the school life just

to concentrate on the podcast.

So, you took the plunge.

Took the plunge, yeah.

Into, into full-time YouTubing, not YouTubing, full time podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, definitely not YouTubing, actually.

Not yet.

Because the podcast is not on YouTube at the moment, so...

It could be.

It could be, we'll talk about it afterwards.

Yeah, we'll talk about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I think it is a really great idea using news as a teaching point because

news is so relevant to so many people.

It's part of my daily routine.

I come down in the morning and I ask my, you know, device that sits on

the side that you talk to with a name beginning with A, that I can't say

because she starts talking back to me.

I ask her what, what's the news and, and she'll play it to me.

And sometimes I, after lunch, I'll ask her again, what's the news?

And I just listen while I'm cooking or cleaning up and just trying to keep up to

date with what's going on in the world.

And in this country, it's always such a roller coaster.

I've certainly been much more into the news since COVID or actually

since Brexit, I think once we have the Brexit vote from that point on,

I think I was just so flabbergasted with what was going on and so much

more involved and interested in like politics and what's actually happening

at a national and international level.

Maybe it's an age thing, I don't know, maybe you just get to a point in life

where you feel like you're actually impacted by things in the world and

you need to know what's going on.

I actually think, and I think the same thing happened for a lot of people in

Britain from Brexit just because there was such a dramatic effect on people's actual

lives coming from a political decision.

So, I think there was something, it was quite a moment for people

to go, oh wow, this stuff that happens on the news, it actually

has a big effect on me, wow, okay.

Yeah, and Brexit is still such a big talking point, isn't it?

I mean, I know that within families, within my family, within my partner's

family, there's disagreements.

Like we sit on opposite sides of the fence and, you know, this rift that's been

created from the Brexit vote has continued to be a debate up until this day.

You know, things like if anything is difficult now because of Brexit or

if it comes out that it hasn't been as successful, it's always like,

see, see, this is what you did.

You know, it's a continuous kind of battle to convince the others that,

that maybe it wasn't such a good idea, but everyone's got their own opinion.

Yeah, well, it's been eight years.

So, I wonder whether in another eight years, it will be exactly the same.

I wouldn't be surprised.

Yeah, well I've started seeing in people's windows as I drive

around, like reunite posters.

That'll be the next big thing.

Probably.

I don't know.

Anyway, coming back to the idea of using news to teach now, I think it's

a great idea, but I think you have to a little bit brave, almost, bold

to go out publicly and discuss news in a global kind of way on a global

platform because, you know, some news, well, all news is divisive in some way.

It kind of triggers people, especially with what's going on with the

conflicts and all the political change.

And you know, there's so much, there's just so much emotion attached to the news.

And...

100 per cent.

I know if I ever even, you know, hint at not taking a side, but supporting

something on social media, I will get, you know, lots of applause,

but I'll also get lots of hate and attack and how dare you and what about

this and don't you care about this?

And I'm like, whoa!

So, I just shy away from it generally.

So, what's your experience been with handling the news?

Yeah, yeah.

Great question.

And so, so true.

Yeah.

For reasons like what you've just said, the default position can be, okay, I'm

just not going to talk about anything.

I'm not going to go anywhere near any of those controversial subjects.

And I don't blame you or anybody for not wanting to.

Although actually even then you can still have people sending you

messages going, why aren't you talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

No?

So yeah, it can be impossible, but from the perspective of Simple

English News Daily, our aim is to be as neutral as possible.

So just no opinion, just trying to make it as statement of fact as possible.

And I think we generally do pretty well on that.

Yeah, we've been, we get a lot of compliments actually

emails and things saying,

"Oh, it's so unbiased."

Which I absolutely love and I hope for it to always stay like that.

But the truth is, there's always going to be somebody who

thinks that you're not unbiased.

It's just impossible.

You can't please everyone.

You can't.

It's actually impossible.

And it's, there's no point in trying because you can't do it.

It's no, there's always going to be somebody who doesn't believe the things

that you say, even if you try and make it as unbiased and factual as possible.

So, yeah, you have to accept that.

What's your source then?

Because, you know, even I always believed, you know, the BBC is an

unbiased news source, but many people would argue that that's not true.

It depends where the funding comes from.

Everyone's got an agenda these days.

So, where do you go and how do you kind of ensure that you are remaining unbiased and

reporting just the facts as you find them.

Yeah, I mean, again, no source is perfect.

And there's always going to be people who disagree with your sources anyway.

But the places that I generally go to are the more commonly, like, well

known sources that just have thousands of journalists working for them.

So, Reuters news agency is one of the big ones.

Associated Press is another one of the big ones.

They have journalists just working all over the world who are, are

really hands on with their stories.

But then also, yeah, for, I would definitely go to the

BBC for a lot of things.

I mean, really, the truth is for a lot of the things that we're saying,

there's not going to be much controversy in the reporting of most stories.

Like for example, if there has been an earthquake in Ecuador, the difference

between the reporting of the BBC or CNN or Reuters or Al Jazeera is going to be

minimal, you know, that for most stories, the sources agree with each other.

It's only from slightly more controversial topics that you get differences in

the way that they report on things.

And in those cases, I try to read a lot of them, which is why I spend so

much time reading and watching and listening to the news, particularly

of the more controversial things.

But also to avoid bias.

In the podcast, we just use terms like according to da,

da, da, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, according to Al Jazeera, this happened, blah, blah, blah.

According to the BBC, they said this, this person said this, this person said this.

So, you can kind of...

Just reporting on what's being said without committing to knowing

it or suggesting that it's fact.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So, is there anything that you actually avoid?

You know, because obviously with things like conflict and death, murder, things

like that, is there anything when you go, oh, maybe that's just a bit

too gruesome or a bit too negative.

I might not cover that one.

No, actually there isn't.

No, we would cover everything.

So, no holds barred.

No, I don't think so.

No, I don't think there's anything which we've ever just not reported

on because it's too gruesome.

There have been a few episodes where I've actually said,

"The next 90 seconds of audio are reporting on something really violent".

Or something.

"If you want to, you can skip ahead to minute 02:30."

Or something like that.

That's helpful.

I've said that a few times.

If there's like kids in the room.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I've had a bit of uncertainty about how I feel about children listening to

Simple English News Daily because of that because the truth is death makes the news.

It's one of those things which which happens, you know almost every day.

When quite a lot of people die, it's generally going to be in the news, you

know, even whether that's an earthquake or an attack or something, it just is.

And yeah, I've heard quite a few people say, that they listen to SEND7 with their

children and I've often thought like,

"Hmm, I'm not sure how I feel about that."

But I suppose the truth is when I was a kid, I was listening to

stuff on the news as well, so I guess, I guess it's the same.

They've got to grow up sometime.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

And realise this world that we live in.

But it's not all bad, in every episode of SEND7, there's always good

news as well, or some funny news or something random that happens as well.

We cover stories from every continent, so there's something from Europe every day,

something from Asia, an Oceania every day, something from Africa every day and

something from the Americas every day.

And yeah, so there's always going to be a mix.

There's going to be something bad, but there's always going to be

something light hearted as well.

So, touching on that, I had a look to see if I could find any kind of good fun

stories knocking around the news recently.

And I found one, I don't know if you came across this story about the

thong-wearing protesters in Australia.

No, I've not heard that, no.

Okay.

Let me read this to you.

Hang on a minute though.

Go on.

Thongs in Australia means...

No, but I'm talking about swimwear, bare bottoms.

Ah, okay.

Not the sandals!

Because I think thongs in Australia mean sandals, right?

Yeah, yeah, it does.

I think it's more slang though, so I think it depends on where in Australia.

I'm not 100 per cent sure on that, but.

Yeah.

But yeah, the, the story I saw says, throngs of thong-wearing protesters,

I love that, throngs of thong-wearing protesters bared their bums on

Australia's Gold Coast as they showed their opposition to calls for

a ban on g-string bikini bottoms.

The demonstration was called free the peach.

And it's, yeah, it's because some people are calling, saying the

skimpiest swimwear is just demeaning to women, that it's objectifying them,

and it's unpleasant, and it should be banned, and other people are like, we

should have the freedom to bare our bums if that's what we want to do.

I thought that was quite an interesting story.

Yeah, but then, I mean, if you really want to get into the politics of just how big

some underwear, some beachwear has to be.

I mean, are you gonna have police going up and down the beach?

Well that's the thing, yeah.

Checking the, checking the size of everybody's...

Yeah, at what point do you start, can you show a little bit of your butt?

Or does it have to be fully covered?

I mean, yeah.

Yeah, you're gonna get the ruler out and start measuring people on the beach.

It doesn't sound great.

I think I'm going to be with the bare bummers on that story.

Yeah.

I can understand wanting to bare your bum if you've got lots of sunshine.

It's nothing worse than having that, what we call the bikini line, you know,

the tan line, cutting your bum in half.

Did you see the one about the Guinness World Records oldest dog?

Yes.

Do you know what?

I've even followed that story quite, quite a bit, actually,

because SEND7 reported on that.

It must have been, ooh, maybe, maybe six months ago or something when Bobby.

Yeah, Bobby the dog.

When Bobby the Portuguese dog actually won the award for the oldest dog.

And then, then we reported when he died a few months later, in October, there

you go, I know this story quite a bit.

Oh, good memory!

I think he was supposed to be 31, and then...

Yeah, 31 and 165 days old.

There you go, there you go.

But it was only recently that the Guinness World Records have taken it away.

They've stripped him of his title.

They've stripped him of his title, exactly right, saying that

there wasn't enough evidence.

And I think it was because the owners in these old registries from the 90s,

they were allowed to write in their own date of birth of the dog, and

because they were allowed to write it in themselves, the Guinness World

Record says, actually, we don't have enough proof that that's actually true.

You could have just made that up.

So they've taken it away.

They've got to maintain their high standards, right?

So, they can't just say we'll take your word for it.

What they've now gone back to saying was the oldest dog was this dog called

Bluey from Australia who was around in 1935 or something like that, which

was 29 and I think really that those records can't be that good either right?

From the 1930s of a dog.

Yeah, how can you prove that?

These dogs have got a life expectancy of like 12 to 14 years.

And so, to live like nearly 30 or over 30 years is it's like a person

getting to, you know, 180, 190, it seems a little bit far-fetched to me.

It does, yeah!

The other things that popped up in the news for me that I

thought were interesting, both are around dental news, nashers.

The first is that some children, I think, this is specifically in America, are being

gifted like a hundred dollar bills and designer jewellery by the tooth fairy.

Wow!

Yeah.

Those are some spoiled children.

Yeah.

Did you ever have a visit from the tooth fairy when you were growing up?

Do you know what, we didn't do that in my family, actually.

No?

But I know...

What did you do with your teeth when they fell out?

Just...

I can't remember.

Stuck them in the bin.

Yeah.

No, no, I think I kept them somewhere lying around.

I didn't do, didn't do the tooth fairy.

We had the tooth fairy.

I think it was like we got 20 pence or 50 pence if we were a little older, perhaps.

That sounds reasonable.

Yeah.

So for those listening who aren't familiar with the tooth fairy, the tooth

fairy visits when you lose a tooth, one of your milk teeth or your baby

teeth, you've put it under your pillow.

And then as you sleep, the tooth fairy will come and replace your

tooth with a gift, a coin, usually.

If you've got good teeth, if you've got rotten teeth and you haven't been

brushing your teeth and looking after them, then she doesn't want your teeth.

But yeah, I mean, it's crazy if these kids are getting like designer

jewellery and hundred dollar bills, that is definitely a spoiled child.

I would...

Absolutely, yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, the other tooth story is about Winston Churchill's false teeth.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I heard about that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were snapped up.

I love that.

They were snapped up at auction for 18,000 pounds.

Yeah.

Yeah, amazing.

Can you imagine?

Yeah.

I wonder what people are going to do with those.

I suppose they're not going to be using them and going,

"I've got Winston Churchill's false teeth in my mouth."

No.

Yeah.

Oh, can you?

Ugh, yeah.

Gross.

Yeah, but apparently that they he was wearing them in some particular speeches.

Yeah, we'll fight them on the beaches.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And well, there are many famous speeches, but apparently he had

like four sets of false teeth.

So, I don't think you can definitely say that the ones that you just spent 18,000

pounds on all the ones that he wore specifically during those big speeches.

They might have just been his spare pair that sat in the back of a dusty drawer.

Yeah.

I do know of another auction story recently, actually, which was from a few

weeks ago that was somebody wanted to sell this big cabinet, like a wardrobe

at auction, that they thought was from like the 1830s or something like that.

So, like almost 200 years old.

And when they were going to be taking it to the auction house,

they found a lemon inside it and the lemon had an inscription.

So, like, somebody had written on this lemon that, and it said,

"From somebody to somebody"

I think it was 1780 something.

So, like, it was, the lemon was 250 or 270 years old or something like that.

Sorry, if I'm getting this story wrong.

And so, they found this lemon in the wardrobe and then they put that on auction

instead and it was shown to be, you know that that old 270 years old or something

and that sold for a few thousand pounds.

And the wardrobe only got like 40 pounds.

Wow.

Yeah.

The things people want.

It's crazy what people spend their money on.

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Totally.

I don't know whether I would prefer to have a really old lemon or Winston

Churchill's false teeth, but yeah.

So coming back to our lovely learners.

How would you suggest that an English learner can make the most

of learning English through news?

Yeah.

I suppose from my perspective of how I've used the news as a learner,

it's primarily been from having this contact with it every day.

So just having, it's such an easy thing to slip into your routine, to listen to

the news, you know, like when I go down and make myself a breakfast, I put on

French radio for 10 minutes or something.

And it's just like a routine that I have every day.

And it's easy to do that with, with the news.

So, it's, it's good for people who, even if they're not like actively

learning English, it's a good way to kind of keep up with it.

But then for people who want to do it more actively and actually engage more

with their contents, then they can.

If they're following a story every day, then it can be easier to pick up more

and more words from the same story.

If they know about a story in their own language, then they're more

likely to understand it in English.

Because of the context.

Exactly, yeah, the context.

And then of course if they really want to, well, with something like

SEND7, they could print out their transcripts, or be following it

by reading it at the same time.

There's some activities they can do.

Yeah, and then you can go ahead and report to other people what you've heard.

You can discuss, you know, my partner and I, we often, if I go out in the car and

I've listened to a radio, like, you listen to LBC just, just because occasionally...

It's great.

...I find it interesting.

They discuss things a little bit more in-depth.

And I will often come back after listening to that and say,

"Oh, did you hear about this?"

And so then we discuss it and I say,

"Oh, well, apparently."

And I'd give him more details about the story and then he'll take it or

leave it completely ignore me perhaps.

But your listeners, or anyone who's learning English through news can use

that as an activity to then take what they're hearing, make some notes of

the interesting vocabulary, that's, specifically attached to that story

and then replay it, go and retell it to someone using that vocabulary,

so that you're actually kind of making it more active for yourself.

Yeah.

Well, let's think about the four things now.

So, listening, well, you're listening to it anyway.

So that's the idea.

Reading, you can obviously read the news.

If you're listening to SEND7, you can read the transcripts.

Or reading any other part of the news that you can that you can find

writing you can challenge yourself.

So, you can say you can make yourself try to write in your own words something that

you've just been hearing about in India.

Or writing a text to a friend.

Did you hear about the bare bottom protest in Australia?

Yeah, fantastic Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah start a conversation with a friend like that.

And of course speaking you can do the same thing.

Talk to your friend about it.

If you don't have somebody to talk to, talk to yourself.

Like, I used to do that when I was in Argentina, when I was by myself.

Just walk around talking to yourself.

Yeah.

Talk to myself in Spanish.

Yeah.

Maybe if I was in public, then maybe just in my head.

But, yeah, yeah.

Just try and think, how do I say that?

If I wanted to say this, how would I say this?

Yeah.

Fantastic.

There you go.

I've got one last question for you.

So, one thing I struggle with when I'm including factual or historical

pieces within my content is pronunciation of names and places.

How do you make sure that you're pronouncing things correctly?

I recently did an episode which hasn't been released yet that includes talking

about chess grandmasters and there's a Russian chap who was a chess grandmaster.

I can't remember his name off the top of my head.

Garry Kasparov.

Kasparov.

Kasparov.

And I think I was calling Garry Kaspernov or something.

It was completely messing it up.

And then one of my team, who's Ukrainian, was like, you've mispronounced this quite

a few times, you might want to record it.

I probably have as well.

I've, I've, I've said Kasparov because I've read that myself.

I think in Russian it's Kasparov.

Yeah, it could be.

Yeah, it could be.

Yeah, but I'd completely, I'd really, really made mincemeat of

the name and it happens a lot.

I completely mispronounce names and places and how do you make

sure that you're not doing that?

Wow.

I'm going to sound like an advert right now.

So, disclaimer, this is not an advert, right?

But honestly, there's this website called Forvo, which I use all the time.

I've never been asked this question before, by the way, Anna, and this is

the first time I've ever been asked this, but I use it all the time.

If I'm ever not sure how to pronounce a name there's this website called

Forvo and it's just a website of people pronouncing words, but mostly names.

Yeah, can you can you spell that out for me?

F O R V O.

Okay,

F O R V O.

I guess it's dot com.

I think I can't remember.

Yeah, I use it all the time.

So...

Fantastic.

I will...

Almost every day.

...add that to my list of resources.

That's brilliant.

It's really really useful and you and they generally have a few

different people saying it as well.

So, it's just people recording themselves saying that name and it

shows the country that the person who is speaking comes from as well.

So, you might have a Ukrainian saying Gary Kasparov.

But you might have a Russian saying Gary Kasparov.

I don't know and you can hear it and choose your favourite one.

Yeah, fantastic.

Really useful.

Yeah, that's a really, really useful little resource you've shared with me.

Thank you.

Yeah, no problem.

Well, thank you so much for being here and if my listeners would like to come

over and start adding news to their daily routine, where can they find you?

Well, if they're listening in a podcast app, then they can

search Simple English News Daily.

Simple English News Daily.

Or if they don't have a podcast app, well, you should go and get one

because podcast apps are the best.

Yeah.

I can recommend Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Castbox, whatever.

But it's also on send7.org.

So S E N D 7 .org.

And just in case you didn't pick up on it before, SEND7 stands for

Simple English News Daily and the 7 is seven minutes because it's

a seven minute podcast every day.

So, there you go.

Fantastic.

Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.

So, thank you for joining.

I will put your links in the description and in the show notes so

that it can be easily found as well.

Take very good care.

And until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thanks for having me, Anna.

Bye.