You are listening to the first episode of a mini-series entitled “Your English Podcast” or “YEP” for short, and in this episode I am going to showcase recordings sent to me by listeners as part of a big competition. I’ve launched to celebrate the 5th birthday and 200 episodes of LEP. All the details of this competition are in episode 200 so you might like to listen to that one first if you haven’t already. Also, before I play you the first set of competition entries I’m going to give you some information, rules and guidelines about the voting process in the introduction to this episode, which I am going to start, now!
Right-click here to download this episode.

Information, Rules & Guidelines for Voting & Listening to these Episodes
– I’ve received about 80 recordings. The maximum time limit was 5 minutes, and most of the recordings are around 5 minutes long. That’s quite a lot of content for us to deal with! The podcast is clearly bigger than it was last time I did this. I got about 25 entries last time, so it has multiplied by three in about 2 years. Because of the number of entries I’ve had, this is going to be the first in a mini-series of episodes devoted to recordings sent in by listeners. I’m not sure how many there will be. It depends on how many recordings I can squeeze into each episode, but I suspect that it will be in the region of 8 episodes! Wow! Please do listen to them all, and please remember to vote for your favourite.

– Normal podcasting will be resumed soon. For now, I would like to ask listeners to the podcast to take part in this competition by listening and voting. Of course, if you’d rather not listen & vote – that’s up to you. You can just skip these episodes and wait for more content to be uploaded soon. However, I personally hope that you do listen and vote. It’s really nice to hear the voices of the LEP community from around the world. It’s a beautiful thing indeed, and there’s a lot to be gained from hearing from people who are all united in a common interest, despite coming from all around the world.

– Here are the rules for voting: There are a lot of people for you to listen to and lots of names to remember so to make it easier you can vote once per episode. So, if you like one recording in the first episode, you can vote for it, but then if you like another recording in another episode you can vote for that too, but you can only vote once per episode!

– How to vote: Just leave a comment on teacherluke.co.uk saying “I vote for Yoda from Degoba” or “I vote for Leia from Alderaan” or “I vote for Wicket from Endor”. Just type the name of the person and their country in a comment below that episode. I’ll only accept votes that are added as comments on teacherluke.co.uk under the correct episode. You don’t need to add your name or email address if you don’t want to. You can vote anonymously, but remember – as the administrator for teacherluke.co.uk I will know if you’re voting more than once, and I won’t count those repeated votes. But, feel free to encourage your friends and family to vote for you if you want to. Just direct them to the relevant page on teacherluke.co.uk and ask them to leave their comment.
– Voting closes exactly one month after the publication of this episode. I’m going to publish all these competition entries at the same time.

– Language feedback. This is a learning English podcast after all, so I do think it is appropriate to give some language feedback as a way of dealing with any language errors which I hear in the competition entries. I hope you don’t mind being corrected, and I hope you see it as a great opportunity to learn from mistakes. I’m sure you do see the value in that, especially since you’d have to pay a lot of money to get a teacher to correct your errors in a language school or private lesson. You’re getting it free here. Obviously, the word “donation” comes to mind at this point, but anyway… How am I going to give language feedback? Well, because I have so many recordings to play it will just take too long if I give language feedback and error correction after each one. So, what I’m going to do is listen to all the competition entries, write down errors and feedback, then record a whole episode in which I go through that list giving corrections and feedback. That way, we can run the competition effectively, and then learn from each other’s errors (if there are any) as well. So, as you listen to this, remember that a language feedback episode is coming later.

– On the subject of errors which you might hear – please remember this: Obviously, we’re all trying not to make errors and it’s important to speak correctly but we must not feel too bad about making errors, we must see them as learning opportunities rather than intolerable breakdowns in language proficiency, and we mustn’t let errors break our confidence and stop us from communicating.

We really must be tolerant of our own errors, but we must also be tolerant of other people’s errors too. In your lives & careers you probably won’t spend most of your time in communication with native speakers of English. In fact, most of the time you will be speaking to non-native speakers in English – and it will be quite natural for you to hear errors in those conversations. It’s completely normal and natural, and we need to get used to listening to a variety non-natives speaking English. For example, if you just listen to native speakers all the time, when you come to do business with non-natives in English, you might be shocked to discover a rather different variant of English. It could be Spanish-English or Russian-English or Korean-English for example. Although they might not be ‘correct’ in a pure sense, they do exist as varieties of spoken English as a second language. Some people might view these varieties of English as wrong, but let’s be practical about it. It’s hard to learn English to a perfect level. There will always be a bit of influence from the first language. The aim should be effective communication rather than just a perfect replication of the language as spoken by Brits or Americans or whatever. In a moment of communication like a telephone call, a business meeting or even a date, the responsibility for that communicative act is on both people. It’s up to the speaker to speak correctly, with clear pronunciation, correct vocabulary and grammar and so on, but also the listener takes responsibility too – how? By tolerating errors, by becoming familiar with different varieties of non-native English, by being patient & positive and by trying to interpret the message being given to them, and not just sitting there in judgement expecting a perfectly tailored message to be handed to them on a plate. Good communicators know that good communication is a two-way street. It takes two to tango. Both sides bear the responsibility for successful communication. The speaker and the listener. So be patient, tolerate errors, don’t judge too harshly and make an effort to understand and interpret what is being said to you.

– I’m very pleased to present the voices of listeners, and I’m glad that LEP can, just for a moment, become a platform for people to communicate and practise their English.

– So, enjoy the recordings and please vote for your favourite competition entry. What does this mean? Just choose the one that you like the most. It’s not necessarily about language level, it could be about personality or anything else for that matter. Which one do you like the most? Remember that the winner of this competition will be interviewed by me on the podcast via Skype (for up to 30 minutes I expect). Leave 1 vote per episode under the relevant page on teacherluke.co.uk and in one month I will count the votes and announce the winner. If it’s a tie and there’s no clear winner, we’ll just cross that bridge when we come to it!

– Welcome to Your English Podcast. Let’s get started.

In this showcase you’re going to hear competition entries from these LEPSTERS:

Episode 1:
Adam from Poland
Alexandr from Russia
Alexis from Canary Islands
Anna from Ukraine
Aritz from Spain
Artur from Kazakhstan
Arturo from Mexico
Ashish from India
Bella from Russia
Bruno from Brazil

Voting in the competition is now closed.

Check out the other YEP episodes here:
218. YEP! Competition Entries #8
217. YEP! Competition Entries #7
216. YEP! Competition Entries #6
215. YEP! Competition Entries #5
214. YEP! Competition Entries #4
213. YEP! Competition Entries #3
212. YEP! Competition Entries #2