Short Storiesintensive English 1



Here are 10 short “Shaggy Dog Stories” in mp3 formatthat you can download free of charge.You can also download a story called “Going to California”.

  1. English Stories Short
  2. English Short Stories For Students

The story of the stories

A word randomizer for finding quick inspiration. Generate a random list of words from 2500+ of the most common English words. Also filter by part of speech! English Level 1: 1. First Day of School 3. Water on the Floor 4. Ruined by the Rain 9. Banana Nut Muffin 10. A New Vision 12. Carte france tomtom one crack. Special Cereal 14. Picking a Color for the House 16. The Beach Is Fun 17. A Beautiful Garden.

We got the stories from our English teacher in high school around January 1994.The stories were on a vinyl record attached to a copy of theEnglish Teaching Forum,which is a magazine for English teachers published by the United States Department of State.Our teacher knew we were interested in learning American English, so he copied themto tape, and gave them to us. We copied the tapes from each other, and listened to them many times – so many thatwe can still tell the first story (“The Intelligent Dog”) from memory.

We listened to the tape almost every day, trying to imitate the American accent— with success. The tapes were an important reason why we learned to speak excellentAmerican English in high school.

In 2001, Tom decided to make an Audio CD with the stories. He had two reasons.He wanted to have the stories on a more robust medium than a tape (tapes wear outwhen you play them many times and lose sound quality). He wanted something that he could play as many times as he wanted and something that hecould copy for his students.So he sampled the stories from his old tape into his computer, cleaned up the recordingsdigitally, and burned them as audio tracks onto a CD.

Later, Tom found the owner of the recordings on the Internet (the English Teaching Forum)and contacted the magazine.As a result, Antimoon got the permission to distribute the recordings freely ina digital format. In July 2002, we finally found the server space to make the recordings available.

Short storiesintensive english 11

How you can use the stories

We think the stories can be very useful for learners of American English.The actors speak clearly and slowly, so you can understand the recordings quite easily.

  • Listen to the stories frequently.
  • Pay attention to the actors’ pronunciation ofEnglish sounds and words.
  • Try to repeat individual words.
  • Pay attention to the grammar and vocabulary.
  • You can also make an Audio CD out of the mp3’s and play them on your CD player.

The stories are rather silly, but we still think they’re funny. You would think so too,if you had listened to them a few hundred times. :-)

English

Copyright

The recordings are the property of theEnglish Teaching Forum magazine— a publication of the United States Department of State. They are published here by permission.

Thanks to:

  • William Ancker (Editor of the English Teaching Forum) for giving Antimoonthe rights to distribute the recordings digitally.
  • Krzysztof “Albercik” Urbański for donating the server space and bandwidth needed to make the recordings publiclyavailable (from Jul 2002 to Dec 2005).

Download

All files are in mp3 format, compressed to 64 kbps mono.

The sound quality is not perfect. Imagine a 10-year-old worn-down vinyl record, which is thencopied to tape on home stereo equipment, then played about 500 times in 8 years, thensampled to a computer. Before we cleaned it up digitally, the tape had mostly noise on it..The quality is worst in the first story, because we have listened to it the most times.

Right-click a link and choose Save Target As to download themp3 file to your hard drive.

English Stories Short

Shaggy Dog Stories

Each file is between 600 KB and 1 MB.

  1. The Intelligent Dog (1:35)
  2. The Amazing Act (1:57)
  3. The Unknown Girl (1:23)
  4. The Hunter and the Lion (2:16)
  5. The Practical Country Boy (2:14)
  6. The Excessive Bill (1:45)
  7. The Hayseed and the Taxi Driver (1:45)
  8. The Secret of a Long Life (2:00)
  9. The Doctor and the Painter (2:14)
  10. The Patient and the Doctor (2:09)

Going to California

  1. Going to California (part 1) (8:01, 3.67 MB)
  2. Going to California (part 2) (6:27, 2.95 MB)

Transcripts

We don’t have the transcripts of these stories.We could type them up, but then people would likely read them before they listened to the stories.This would turn the stories into a poor listening exercise. It would take away the whole pleasure of understandingspoken English without reading it at the same time.

Edit Settings

Random Word Generator

Supposedly there are over one million words in the English Language. We trimmed some fat to take away really odd words and determiners. Then we grabbed the most popular words and built this word randomizer. Just keep clicking generate—chances are you won't find a repeat!

Random Word Games

As an exercise for English students, generate a list of ten random words and have the student write a story that incorporates those words in the order they're generated.

Short

English Short Stories For Students

You could also take the hard work out of playing MadLibs but for that you'll need to separate out the parts of speech. There's generators for each one, just jump over using the options below.





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