What’s your top tip for teaching with video in the classroom? English teachers share their ideas.
Error correction
One question teachers often ask in our webinars is how best to deal with error correction in classroom speaking activities. On the one hand, they don’t want to let errors become fossilised, but on the other they’re reluctant to interrupt students and make them self-conscious.
Video offers an excellent opportunity to ‘have your cake and eat it’. If students are filming themselves, you don’t need to interrupt them in order to review their language – you can watch the recording afterwards, pausing at the error and correcting it. You can get learners to watch their recordings themselves, in pairs or small groups, and look out for and correct their own errors.
Teaching tenses
As Jelena Perisic of Serbia suggests, video offers excellent opportunities to practise tenses with your learners. Stop playing a video at a crucial point and ask students to guess what happens next – they’ll have to use the future tense. Or play a film without the sound and test the present continuous by asking questions such as ‘What are they doing?’ Or practise the present perfect by covering the screen so your learners can only hear the soundtrack, and asking them questions like ‘What has he done?”
Use digital tools to build learner autonomy
Tetiana Guzyk of Ukraine was one of a number of teachers who proposed getting students to create their own digital videos to help them become independent learners. Many suggested tools for doing this. For Apple devices, June Srichinda of France recommended iMovie, while Shadow Puppet – a storytelling app that allows students to add voiceovers to their own pictures and video – was mentioned by Eric Nichols from Italy. For Android devices, both suggested WeVideo.
Give students a reason… and an audience!
One of the best reasons for using video is that it gives students a reason to use English, and an end product that they can share. Dieu Ngoc Nguyen of Vietnam suggested holding a video festival in which students can share the films they’ve made. Knowing that their work has a purpose and an audience can help motivate learners to do their best.
Create a sense of progress
As Tomas Klimecky of the Czech Republic noted in his competition entry, watching past recordings of themselves can be an excellent way of showing learners how much progress they’ve made. Watching a video from a month or two ago, learners will notice errors they no longer make, and should also be pleased to see how much more fluent they’ve become in the intervening months.