I was thinking of listening to on line radios in English to improve my oral comprehension skills.
My favorite radio is BBC 4 intelligent speech but I’ve noticed that British English is far too easy for me to understand, in comparison to American English.
And as the TOEFL is rather an American English examination, I thought I should rather listen to American radios.
But I’ve found no radio that I really like, that is really interesting… I’ve tried CNN, but I find they put too many ads on.
I’ve also found some American local radios, but they are bad quality, or the accent to strong for me.
:? hmmm… I actually try to spend as less money as possible on learning materials, that’s why I was looking for online radios.
I have just listen to NPR and it seems to be excellent
But one good point is that it has a stand-alone listening feature for their live 24H-program.
So I can input it directly in real-player instead of always having to go on the website each time I want to listen to it, contrary to CNN… (BBC has it )
Try the podcasts at the national public radio site NPR.org (sidebar under services, select topic from list > start with technology and work your way through. “I’d skip gardening”
or podcasts at sciam.com discovermagazine.com has a couple, but only on medical topics. Their site is better for vocab training (just ignore the scientific terms and look at adjectives, verbs and nouns that look familiar e.g. “The galaxy is pregnant with dark energy” TOEFL loves such unusual uses of words you thought you knew. CNN.com used to be better, but is becoming increasingly harder to use for this purpose. Always check that you get native speakers.