Spoken English Example Recordings and Videos: Audio Books for Language Study

(From Spoken English Example Videos for Language Study)

One of difficulties many students of English have is distinguishing good language from bad. Here is a short collection of English language example videos which use English on the very highest level.

Audio Books in the Public Domain

Online education is not for the person who must follow a leader. It is not for the person who needs to be told to study, what to study and when. But if learning is your thing, the online class is one way to give your mind what it craves most.

Thanks to the wonderful contributions of The Gutenberg Project, many if not most of the world's great literary works are freely and publicly accessible in text or HTML formats. Librivox, a more recent endeavor is now, with the help of many voluteers, creating audio recordings of these public domain texts.

Unfortunately, as these are being recorded by volunteers, quality control is somewhat lacking. In some cases, the reader does not even know how to prounce the name of the Author correctly (Wodehouse for example). Also, if one is seeking exemplarly English language material, many great works do not serve that purpose particularly well, specifically those which mimic informal speech modes and dialects which do not use formal English language at the level expected of college students.

The following works have been selected for their use of formal (SAT compliant) English.

Audio Books
Title	The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame The Classic Children's Story, read by Guilitis 2010
Difficulty	6/10
Dialect	British (RP) English
Description	Though clearly a children's story, few stories of any sort approach the eloquence and poignancy of The Wind in the Willows. For full text, see The Wind in the Willows Page. This is a playlist of the full text of the work read by an artist who loves and understands the work and whose speech is entirely suited to it.

Still underway, this page will eventually contain selected prose works with commentary. One author whose works will certainly play a major role is P.G. Wodehouse, whose audio-available works are listed below.

Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville), 1881-1975

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. - Percy Bysshe Shelley