Video can provide a fantastic resource and stimulus for language teaching and learning. In today’s post, Claire Egmore and Kathryn Davies share some inventive and fun ways to incorporate video into classroom activities.
When we first started teaching, the use of video in the classroom more often than not extended solely to putting on a film in the last lesson of term and setting students some comprehension questions. The poor students would battle through the entire thing, trying to make sense of what was going on. Nowadays, thanks to writers such as Ben Goldstein and course books like Eyes Open and Uncover, teachers are using video in increasingly creative and dynamic ways, and clips rather than entire films are exploited.
So, why should we use video?
It’s authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s motivating. It can be accessed from a range of devices. It’s a familiar medium which reflects how we are presented with information outside the classroom. It can provide a window into other people’s lives and cultures. Helping students realise they can understand video in English may encourage them to make this part of their routine at home. And finally, visual clues in video provide scaffolding for weaker students without reducing the challenge for stronger students.
Here are some of our favourite tried-and-tested activities:
1 Guess the dialogue
Play a short clip with the sound off. Choose a clip which includes a range of facial expressions. Ask students to imagine what the characters are saying and create a script. Students can then act out their dialogue in sync with the visuals. Finally, play the video again for students to compare their ideas to the real thing.
2 Translate and order (for a monolingual class)
Choose an interesting dialogue or conversation with some useful colloquial expressions in it. Translate a few of the sentences into L1 and put them in the wrong order. Ask students to work in groups to translate the sentences and guess the correct order. Students then watch the clip and check their translations and the order of their sentences.
3 Say what you see
Choose a scene in which there is a clear succession of events. Write the events onto pieces of card and ask students to read them and ask you about any difficult vocabulary. Put students into pairs. One person from each pair should face the screen. The other should have their back to the screen. This student should hold the cards.
Play a short clip from a video with no sound. The students facing the screen should explain what’s happening to their partner who then puts the event cards in order. Finally, let all students watch the clip, with sound, to check the order of their cards.
4 Soundtracks
Choose five songs from different films. They should all be different genres of music and should not be well-known songs.
Tell the students you’re going to play them some songs from films and while listening to each one they should imagine the type of film it’s from and write down exactly what they imagine to be happening in the scene. Stop after each extract and give them two minutes to explain their ideas to their partner. Allow them to watch the original scenes afterwards.
5 Shadow-reading
Once your students are familiar with the content of a particular clip – perhaps any of the above activities – you might like to do some pronunciation work. Shadow reading is where students attempt to speak in time with the characters on screen. They’ll need the script to be able to do this. Put students into small groups (you’ll need the same number of students in a group as characters in the scene) and have them choose roles, or do this as a whole-class activity with all of the boys playing the male role and all of the girls playing the female role. You’ll need to repeat this several times – students will get better each time. By trying to speak in sync with the characters on screen, they’ll be replicating key features of connected speech.
Do you have any top tips for teaching with video? Let us know in the comments below!