Professor Hayo Reinders offers some suggestions on how you can make the most of incorporating video into your ELT classroom.
Clearly, video materials have a number of benefits for learners, but how can they best be integrated into a lesson? Simply telling students to watch some videos on YouTube may be entertaining to them, but it will not ensure the greatest learning outcomes. Video materials, like all other pedagogical content, need careful consideration before they are used. Is the material of a suitable level? Does it contain inappropriate content? Does it presume background knowledge the learners may not have? In addition, video materials require further consideration to ensure their usefulness.
In particular, the following characteristics will help to maximize learning benefits:
- Engaging content. Early CALL materials included videos that were especially designed for English language learners. Although linguistically appropriate, the content was often not of interest to the learners. Now that such a wide range of videos is freely available, teachers can select relevant and engaging content, or even let students choose their own materials to work with.
- Authenticity, to a point. Materials need to be of a level that is challenging, but not too far beyond learners’ capacity. In the early days of the Internet, a common mistake was for teachers and textbooks to simply instruct learners to go online and “find a video about” a certain topic. This resulted in a great deal of frustration as watching authentic materials without guidance or support is simply too difficult for most learners. Authentic materials that are too advanced can be adjusted through simplification, extension, modification (for example, by reducing the playback speed), and through clear links with the course.
- Integration. Videos need to be linked to the materials and classroom activities that precede and follow them, both linguistically and in terms of their content/theme. Video materials can help to illustrate grammatical points, improve extensive or intensive listening skills, or can serve as input for subsequent productive tasks. The key is to see the video as an integral part of the lesson and for learners to recognize this.
- Instruction. It is important for learners to receive clear expectations as to what it is they are to do with a particular video, and what they are expected to learn from it. Without such instruction, learners may simply see the video as an opportunity to relax.
- Support. With most classroom activities, teachers preteach key content, or provide guiding questions and background information. When using online video materials this is particularly important, as is the ongoing monitoring and provision of feedback. Some learners may struggle while watching a video because they stop listening if they hear a word they don’t understand. Such behaviour is easily corrected, but it does require ongoing attention and support on the part of the teacher.
- Tools. Learners can be given access to support tools such as online dictionaries that they can access during or after watching a video. A useful feature is the ability to turn on or off captions, something that YouTube now also supports. In addition to helping with comprehension, this has been shown to encourage the development of reading skills. In addition, some videos, in particular movies, come with different sound tracks, so it may be possible for learners to occasionally listen to the video in their native language. Further, the ability to control playback speed, and to pause and rewind recordings, is a major benefit. With all of these tools and techniques, however, it is important that learners are not only given instruction in how to use them, but also understand what the benefits and downsides of them are. For example, although having access to an online dictionary is useful, if a learner stops every second sentence to look up a vocabulary item, no extensive listening skills are practiced. Teachers, too, can use such tools to enhance video-based lessons. Audio can be muted (for example, for students to complete the dialogues they can see but not hear), or the video can be blacked out (so students can be asked what they think is happening from just listening to the audio).
The classroom activities in the Cambridge Discovery Education Interactive Readers make use of these principles. The video is built into the lesson and covers the linguistic content that is the focus of the unit. The tasks learners are asked to complete all draw on the content of the video. The video itself – see below for an example video about the Great Barrier Reef – is of high quality and is likely to be of interest to the young adults who are the focus of this course.
Deep Blue: Discovering the Sea – The Great Barrier Reef from Cambridge University Press on Vimeo.
Summary
The use of video materials has grown in popularity in education, with learners and teachers able to access authentic English materials easily, and to create and share their own. The challenge for teachers is to find the most appropriate materials, both linguistically and in terms of engaging content, and to integrate these in the most meaningful way. When used successfully, video materials are sure to enhance learners’ interest and improve learning outcomes.
If you’ve been inspired by this article and want to read more from Professor Hayo Reinders, he’s written a great piece about engaging language learners through video. Give it a read!