Also, some of you may remember a video we made about taking calls when you’re busy. Materials for this video are now available at the Simple English Videos store and this week only you can download them for free. Put it in your shopping cart and to enter the coupon code ‘MAGIC’ at check out. So what are you waiting for? Best get over there!
Simple English Videos is one year old and we’re celebrating the event with lesson materials give-aways.
So I’ve written materials to go with some of our English Video Lessons which you can find in our new store. My first indie publication!
And over the next few weeks we’re going to be giving stuff away. For example, this week you can download our ‘Alone – Lonely’ lesson materials for free by using the coupon code BIRTHDAY when you check out. It includes:
PowerPoints (These are the things I find most useful in class – they get students focused and enable me to use lots of pictures)
Students worksheets. They can be used in conjuction with the the PowerPoints if you wish – or given out for homework.
Teachers notes with answers.
Tapescript
An .mp4 version of the video. The videos are available free on youtube and also at the Simple English videos website, but it’s handy to have your own version of the video that you can play when you’re off line.
So the materials arrive as digital files that you can carry with you on a memory stick. I like to have them handy when I’m teaching because you never know when things will come up. It also means you never run out of materials, of course . Just play the video and run the PowerPoints – no preparation required.
The lesson materials are heavily illustrated with images from the videos. Generally they’ll ask students to recall words and phrases they heard and then move on to a short role play or discussion activity. They’re very straightforward.
But why not try one out yourself? Go to the Simple English Videos store. Add ‘Alone-Lonely’ to the shopping cart and then type in BIRTHDAY as you check out to claim your free copy. The BIRTHDAY coupon code is only valid this week, so don’t delay. Also subscribe to the weekly email update because we’ll be giving more lesson materials away and that way you can get all the coupon codes as we create them.
All the movie trailers and Video English Lessons we make are available free at the Simple English Videos site and the lessons are also available on my youtube channel. We plan to try to continue to offer them for free. We’re a two-man team (me and Jay) so we’ve been very appreciative of some of the help, support and encouragement we’ve received from users of the site this year.
If you too would like to support our efforts, here are some things you can do:
Click the like button when you see videos you like. It helps Google know we’re there and just makes us feel good. Oh and comments – we love getting comments and feedback too!
If you really like our videos, please share them on facebook, twitter, tumblr, google+ etc. The video English lessons on my youtube channel are all embeddable.
Consider buying something from the store. We hope it’ll help us offset the costs of running the site.
Help us write a movie trailer transcript – or rather get your students to help us. See more here.
Tell your friends and students. There are more than a hundred movie trailers with clickable transcripts available now – a terrific resource for learners. Plus we have 36 video English lessons, and lots more in the works. We think Simple English Videos is a great place to see real language in context and practice English and probably the very best thing you can do to help us is spread the word.
Finally – a big thank you to all the Simple English Videos website users. Hope to see y’all back again this year.
A class activity – write a transcript for either or both of these forthcoming movies.
Jay and I write the transcripts for the movie trailers at Simple English Videos and I think generally we do a pretty good job between us. I’m aware that we sometimes make mistakes, but it’s handy that I’m British and he’s American. There are phrases I struggle with in American movies that he gets and vice versa.
A few weeks back we had a very kind offer from Tomasz, a teacher in Poland. He was teaching an advanced pronunciation course and wondered if we’d like him to ask his students to transcribe some trailers for us. ‘Oh, yes please’, we said and I sent over a list. What I should have done is explained that we have to turn the videos over pretty quickly and given a deadline, so in the event I had to publish the movies before the transcripts arrived. Duh! But looking at the transcripts gave me an idea. Tamasz’ students’ versions sometimes differed from ours in tiny ways – and sometimes I think they (not us!) got it right.
So it gave me an idea. I’ve just posted two movie trailer videos with NO transcript on the website and invited students to provide one. The deadline is midnight on Friday 16th August and we will be publishing the videos with the clickable transcripts we make (after reading any other versions) on August 19th and 20th. We’ve no idea whether any classes might want to try it, but it seems like such a good listening task to me – either for classwork or homework. Plus hopefully we will all wind up with a better transcript!
A big thank you to Tomasz, Borys, and Sara for inspiring this idea and supporting the Simple English Videos site! It’s much appreciated.
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.)
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.
I watched a 10 minute presentation this morning by Diana England packed with ideas about how to use our one minute videos in class. Here’s a very brief summary.
A lot of the videos (available at http://www.SimpleEnglishVideos.Com/language/) explore differences between confusing words, so one thing to do is use them ‘straight’ as Diana put it – so show the videos and then get students to tell one another how the words differ in meaning.
Alternatively you might get students to think about the language point before they watch – coming up with their ideas on how the words differ in meaning and form/grammar, and then have them watch the video listening out for the rules.
Diana pointed out that the tapescript (available under the videos) can be copied and pasted, providing a text for exploring differences in meaning. Students can use it to rehearse and act out some of the dialogues, and it can also be used to make gapfills.
And if that isn’t enough – a really cool idea Diana had was to follow on with the students making their own one minute videos about words and phrases that are relevant to their own needs and interests.
Here’s a link to Diana’s presentation which was part of IH’s 60th birthday celebrations. I took my very first teacher training course with IH and then went on to work for them too and one of the things I loved about the IH schools I worked in was the way ideas got shared around. This 60th birthday conference is no exception. Many happy returns IH and a BIG thank you to Diana for sharing these ideas!
And if you have any ideas about words or topics you’d like to see illustrated in a one minute video English lesson, please pass them along!
So I’ve written materials to go with some of our English Video Lessons which you can find in 
