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skills must be at least simulated-authentic. In addition, teachers should know how to operate them effectively. 3.1 Recorded materials from the textbooks The electronic appliance, such as tape recorder, radio and MP3 player, can be used anywhere provided listening materials. Through recordings, the class can be offered the chance to hear naturally spoken English, with elisions, linked consonants, weakened vowels and all the hesitations, false starts and imperfections of unplanned speech. Moreover, there are lots of cassettes or CDs, which are produced for students of English. These often go with books and have sets of exercises helping students to train the ear to listen more effectively to English. For example, Longman has published a series of listening materials with workbooks. (e.g. Look ahead) Many other publishers of English as a Foreign Language also have good materials which could be used. These cassettes are rather expensive for an individual student but perhaps the teachers could make them available for the students in school or the students could club together with a group of students to buy one. 3.2 Homemade listening materials Besides the ready-made recorded materials, the teachers can contrive homemade listening materials to support the course. The investment of time is not great, and the tapes or MP3 files can be used year after year. The teachers should take their teaching purpose and the materials features into consideration while selecting materials for students: Table (I) [11] Purpose Text type 1.listening for information Station announcements/instructions/directions / telephone messages 2.listening for gist News / interviews / documents 3.listening for content Lectures / talks 4.listening for attitude Face-to-face conversation / discussion 5.listening for pleasure Stories / jokes / plays / songs, etc. So the table releases some information that different tasks require different texts: Station (airport) announcements, instructions, directions, telephone messages are used for listening for information; News, interviews, documents are used for listening for gist. Then the rest can be done in the same way. 3.3 Radio broadcast materials The teachers help students improve their listening skills by using a useful and effective method to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. There are mainly the following English-speaking international broadcasting corporations in the world: British Broadcasting Corporation; Voice of America; American Broadcasting Company; National Broadcasting Company; Columbia Broadcasting System; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; The Australian Broadcasting Commission; Broadcasting Council of New Zealand. Among them, VOA special English program is a good choice to practice listening and speaking English. Its almost perfect general American pronunciation, slow speed of delivery, simple vocabulary and sentence structures are relatively easy for students to understand and reproduce. Furthermore, its current news reports and variety of feature programs are informative and stimulating for the students. Listening to radio broadcasts has five characteristics: First, the announcers are native speakers with good pronunciation. Second, the programs provide listeners with a high frequency vocabulary and modern usage of language. Third, the programs cover a wide range of topics, and students can enrich their knowledge of the world from these programs. Fourth, the time of programs is limited. F