My techie scoopit doesn’t have many videos yet (please email me me if you have suggestions to add) and I’m not planning to publish it as a newsletter. But in case others are looking for techie class videos, here’s the link: http://www.scoop.it/t/techie-english
And as Scoopit turned out to be so easy for bookmarking, I started another one for odd videos I might want to use in class some day as well.
I must confess, I wondered whether I didn’t have better things to do with my time when I started these.
But already I’ve found there are videos that I’m sure I’d have forgotten about if I hadn’t scooped, as it were. Thanks Carl!
I’ll be demonstrating how video can help teachers and learners get to grips with tricky vocabulary and there will be lots of free resources and practical classroom activities.
The MOOC starts on Monday, July 29 so check out the other sessions too. It’s free to join. Just sign up here and look forward to seeing you!
There are so many uses for video in English lessons, but I think the one that inspires me most its ability to remove blindfolds (as Peter Viney so neatly put it). With video we can provide more information about who might say what to whom, what their relationship is, where they are and how they’re feeling. In short, we can provide more context, and context is so crucial for meaning and use.
If we want to teach the difference between the verbs ‘see’ and ‘watch’, for example, we’re going to want to show that seeing is something that happens whether we’re paying attention or not. It’s difficult to set up a natural context to illustrate that in a classroom. But with video we can go anywhere – a kitchen for example where we see someone stealing a freshly baked cookie. ‘Hey, I saw that’ wouldn’t add much understanding as a written sentence in a course book, but demonstrated in context in a video it illustrates the ‘paying attention or not’ concept beautifully. ‘Actually’ is another example. We can tell our students that it means ‘really’ or ‘in fact’, but if they’re going to understand how to use it, they need to see it in use in context. Again, video is great for that. These sorts of things don’t work with audio alone.
So it seems to me that if video is available, it’s silly to teach without it these days. And that poses a problem for ELT publishers. They’d love to employ video widely but they know that sadly many teachers still don’t have access to it, so mainstream courses tend to get published with a bit of video, but not too much because they need to work for everyone. But does ‘one-size-fits-all’ really work because if teachers have access to video, why would they want to restrict their classes with audio? Why wouldn’t they want to step outside the classroom and show (really show) the language in context?
And on a similar but different point – another video benefit that I think has all sorts of (as yet pretty much untapped) potential is animation. We were making a video about indirect questions the other day. You know how the word order changes when questions get embedded with phrases like ‘Could you tell me …?’ ‘Do you know…?’ Take a look at this:
I put that video together rather hurriedly and when I get time I’d like to go back and make it look sharper. But I’m pretty sure that it will be more helpful to play this for my students than to have them look at static sentences in their course book.
Do you have you any suggestions for what I should do when I re-edit it? All thoughts and ideas will be gratefully received and shared. And what do you think the main benefits of video are? And do you agree that that if you do have access to video, it’s just plum daft to teach without it these days?
Here are two more short video English lessons. They’re also available with clickable transcripts (handy for making gap-fills and other exercises) at my Simple English Videos website.
Tyson Seburn reminded me of Barnga today – a terrific game for exploring cross cultural issues. Check out Tyson’s post and if you haven’t already bought a copy of the Barnga rules (and some packs of playing cards) for your classes, you won’t regret it.
And it also reminded me that the creator of the game has a terrific website with lots of free management and training games – a very inspiring place for business English teachers to explore. His name is Thiagi and if you ever get the chance to attend one his talks – jump at it. In fact the very first date my husband took me on was a Thiagi talk, and I married him. (My husband that is, not Thiagi.)
Here are some more minute video English lessons. As well as my youtube channel, you can also see them at Simple English Videos where they’re available with a clickable transcript that you can use to make exercises or role plays.
We have more videos like this in the works and if you’d like to know when a new one comes out, subscribe to my new weekly newsletter. It has links to all the movie trailers we’ve published each week, and also any English lesson videos we’ve made. You can subscribe here.
Bad-model Good-model videos have a long history in management and business English training. The first time I came across the genre was in a series of management training videos from Video Arts (of John Cleese fame) but the technique was later employed very successfully in business English by Derek Utley and Jeremy Comfort of York Associates. Their early videos were picked up and remade by OUP and perhaps some of you will remember the resulting lovely’ Effective’ skills series? Those videos inspired me to play around with the genre myself so back in the 90s I wrote a little video called ‘Play it Again Sam’ for OUP.
But I digress. The way these videos work is you see someone performing a business task, but very badly. The class has to identify what they did wrong and decide how they could have done things better. They then act out a new and better version of the scenario before they get to see a second video where things go well. And if they haven’t got fed up by then, they can go on to compare the ‘good’ version they created with the ‘good’ version in the second video.
I wondered if it would be possible to do something similar again, but much shorter. Could we get something down to a minute? We couldn’t, but we got pretty close. Here are our attempts and I hope you find them useful for your small talk lessons.
I’ve now made these videos available with clickable transcripts (great for making comprehension tasks) on Simple English Videos dot com here and here.
Last Saturday IATEFL’s BESIG held its first ever online conference for Business English teachers. It was an amazing day with 24 speakers and satellite events happening simultaneously in Brasilia, Brazil; Leuven, Belgium; Montevideo, Uruguay; Stuttgart, Germany and Ulm, Germany.
I am in awe of the BESIG BOT (Business Online Team) and want to say a big thank you and congratulations to Claire Hart, Kristen Acquaviva, Justine Arena, Roy Bicknell, Carl Dowse, Matt Halsdorff, Michelle Hunter, Christina Rebuffet-Broadus, Charles Rei, Pete Rutherford, Mercedes Viola and Andi White for pulling off a superb job. With a little help from help from Mike Hogan, and Heike Philp they delivered a great program and lead the way in professional development in ELT.
The talks will be available free to the public here until June 24th 2013, at which point they will be archived and available to BESIG members on the BESIG website.
So if you’re not a BESIG member, go check them out fast, and you might want to sign up and join.
I’m sure many of you will be familiar with The Consultants-E and the irrepressible Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney. Together they run the online training and consultancy service to do with the use of technology in language teaching.
But what you might not know is I’ve been producing videos for The Consultants-E, including an ever growing set of case studies. This is a series they commissioned where teachers share their experiences of introducing technology in their classrooms. The videos are freely available on The Consultants-E’s youtube channel and they are well worth checking out of you’re embarking on any e-learning projects.
The Consultants-E are 10 years old this year and they’re celebrating in style. This month they’re giving away a free scholarship to one of their certified online courses and the winner can choose between a Cert ICT or Cert IBET, so you get an accredited qualification. I’ve spoken to lots of teachers who have taken these courses and without exception, they’ve all thought they were terrific. (It’s actually pretty easy to make promotional videos for the Consultants-E because everyone you interview raves about them!) So hurry up if you’re interested in applying for that scholarship because the deadlines are approaching.
But there’s more…
There’s another freebie this month! They are giving away an ebook called ‘The Little Book of Blogs’. It’s a collation of blog posts by Nicky, Gavin and many other The Consultants-E trainers, that was expertly curated by Anne Fox. (Yes, that’s the same Anne Fox who co-hosts the award winning Absolutely Intercultural podcasts.) Anne has packed the book with useful free resources and expertise for teachers and I’m honoured to say that includes some of my blog! So head here to download your free copy today.
So happy birthday The Consultants-E. And before you go everyone, please click below and check out the 10th birthday video I made. How did they manage to get all that done in 10 years? See – I told you they were irrepressible.
When I started English teaching, staff rooms were sometimes dotted with actors, often colourful characters who would be making ends meet by teaching EFL while they were ‘resting’. (Is that still the case?) And perhaps because they weren’t following the same career goals as the mainstream, I think it may have been easy to overlook the unique skills they were bringing to the classroom.
I was reminded of this last week when we videoed Jason R Levine (aka Fluency MC) interviewing Rachel of Rachel’s English. If you haven’t checked out Rachel’s website yet, do. She also has a Youtube channel that has tens of thousands of subscribers for whom she’s teaching English pronunciation very effectively, despite the fact that she hasn’t had any EFL/ESL teacher training. Really! Rather than following what many would view as a traditional CELTA, DELTA, and applied linguistics MA route, (like me and countless others), Rachel trained as an opera singer.
Something to understand about opera singing: diction is a hard and technical discipline. In order to sound convincing as an opera singer, you need to be able to get to grips with the sounds of Spanish, Italian, German, French, or whatever language it is you’re singing in. And if you work on it for ten years or so, like Rachel, you become very aware of things like your breath, your tongue placement, rhythm and melody – and probably more importantly for TEFL, you develop language that enables you to talk about it.
So Rachel has some very cool skills. She has an excellent ear so when her students say something, she’s good at imitating it. And then after she’s done that, she can identify what needs to shift to make it sound English and then she can articulate what adjustments they need to make to their lips, tongue, voice or whatever.
I learnt something on Rachel’s site last week that I wish I’d known before. Like many British English teachers I suspect, when teaching ‘can’ and ‘can’t’, I’ve been highlighting the longer vowel sound in ‘can’t’. This works for British English, but what I was unaware of was ‘can’t’ is shorter in ‘merican because of the stop. And that’s after 14 years living here and paying attention. (Though obviously, not nearly enough!) Thank you Rachel!
So the next time you find yourself sitting next to an actor or opera singer in the staff room, make sure to tap into some of their pronunciation knowledge and ask them what aspects of pronunciation they think you should work on most with your students and why. (Rachel reckons rhythm is often crucial.)
If you’d like to watch the interview, you can sign up to see it here on June 20, 2013 at 6 pm EST.
Ah – nearly forgot! Here’s a trailer for the interview.
