Many non-English speaking countries recognize that English is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of our world. Many students can read and write in English with a high rate of accuracy without commensurate listening and speaking skills. Here are some ways for students to address this problem in cost effective ways.
Pod Casts
First use the Internet. Search for "pod casts" in English that are on subjects of interest to you. Find short pod cast and download them to your MP3 player or computer and play them over and over again. Transcribe the words into written form so you can read them and listen to them at the same time. Play them until you have memorized the dialog and can recite it with understanding. Let your accent change as you go.
Music
You can also search on the Internet for songs that are of good moral quality and are easy to understand the words to. Download these and play them on your MP3 player or computer. Sing with them. Learn the words and their meaning's.
Stories
You can also search for stories that are in MP3 / MP4 format that of a good moral quality and do the same with them.
TV and Radio
You can of course listen to the English broadcasts on TV and on the radio.
Listen to PDF Files
PDF files present another interesting possibility as the computer can read these files to you. In order to do this you need to download the free version of PDF reader. Here is how to proceed:
Download Adobe Reader from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/
Download and install Adobe Reader.
After installation, configure the reading mode by clicking on:
Edit | Preferences | Reading | then un-check "Use Default Speech Attributes" and set Words Per Minute to 150.
With Adobe Reader installed you can search the Internet for PDF files of interest to you. For example if you are a medical student and you are interested in cancer, you can use Google's advanced search to find only PDF files on cancer like this:
Here is a link to a Google search that will find PDF files in English containing the Cancer
Download the files you find and save them to a folder of your choice. Click on one of the files and Adobe Reader will start. Then choose:
View | Read Out loud | Activate Read Out loud
then
View | Read Out loud | Read to the end of the document (or read this page only). Read and listen to the words. Not all the pronunciation is perfect, but in most cases it is acceptable.
Create Your Own PDF Files
You can also create your own PDF files from any windows based document such as an RTF file, a Word Document or a web page.
To do this you need another program that is also free.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Look for something like: PDF Creator-0_9_3_GPLGhostscript.exe and click on it.
Click on Download PDF Creator and install it on your computer.
Once it is successfully installed you will find "PDF Creator" in the print dialog menu. With this tool you can now create a PDF file from any English source and then using the PDF reader you can have the computer read it to you. All you need to do is find a document and then "print it" to a PDF file. Then you can listen to it.