It’s essential to keep students engaged and interested in lesson content – our Academic Coordinator, Philip Warwick, has prepared an article on 23 ways that video can be integrated into your Junior English lessons. This is part three of three. Read part one here and part two here.
- Fill the Gap – Choose a story that has some twists and turns in the plot. Play the beginning of the sequence and then the end. Students work in small groups and try to reconstruct the middle bit. Finally show them the missing sequence to see if they were correct.
- Hole in the TV – Cover the screen with a piece of paper that has a hole cut out. Play the sequence so that students can only see part of the TV . Get them to discuss what was happening in the rest of the TV, then show them the whole sequence without the paper to see if they were correct.
- Split Screen – Use a large board or piece of cardboard. Place it in the middle of the screen and position the students so that they are in two groups. Play a sequence and then split the students into pairs and get them to discuss what they both saw. Elicit some answers and then play the sequence without the extract for students to check.
- Adjective Match – Write a variety of adjectives describing personality and then show the students an extract that contains a number of different characters. Elicit the names of the characters and then play the extract again. This time students have to assign the adjectives to the characters individually. They then compare with a partner or in small groups.
- Mime – Choose an extract between at least two people that contains a fair amount of movement and gesture. Get the students to adopt roles by showing them the characters with the freeze frame. Play the extract with the sound off, get students to mime the extract in groups (you might need to play this a couple of times for students to perfect it). Then play the extract again (with students still miming) but with sound. Finally elicit any of the dialogue that they managed to catch.
- Instant Interview – This is a very simple way of getting students to do pair interviews. Play a sequence and then either you or one of the interviewer students stops the DVD and then the interviewers ask their partners the following questions about the extract -“What is happening?” “What did they say?” “What is your opinion?” “What will happen?”
- Music Videos – Play a song (a relatively obscure one for your students) and get them to discuss what type of video they would make to accompany it. Finally show them the video and get them to compare with their ideas.
I’m sure most experienced English teachers could add another half dozen activities that they regularly use with videos as well, and with more classrooms equipped with computers and internet access, there really seems to be every reason to use videos more and more.
There is, however, a catch. Today’s English students don’t go out to the video store spending time choosing a film to rent and then go home, make popcorn and sit down to an evening’s entertainment, instead they’ll have streamed a programme directly to their smartphones and already watched half of it on the way to school. Technology has changed the way we watch, TVs are so last century when streaming and downloading apps are so prevalent, and technology is that teaching bugbear that gets us all so nervous and worried about change.
There’s an old saying that technology won’t replace teachers, it’ll just replace teachers who don’t use technology, and whatever we think it is undeniable that innovation is moving at such a pace and embraced so enthusiastically by our students that modern classrooms are filled with digital residents who bring technology into the lesson and expect to use it, and that we as teachers need to be flexible and adapt our methods to take this into account.
We still don’t think of video as a technological resource, after all we have been using videos in English classes for many years, but they have tended to be something extra, a special reward or a chance to consolidate a topic or motivate students by showing them an extract from their favourite movie or an interview with a famous celebrity, something that happens once a month and is seen as an addition to the course rather than as an essential part of the material.
But, the advantages of bringing authentic English language into every lesson and using them to improve students’ performance are perhaps something that we haven’t considered, we know that it can really change the class dynamic, add variety to the lessons and provide them with authentic, stimulating, language-rich content through a medium that today’s students feel comfortable with, I mean, they’re constantly plugged in and looking at screens outside the classroom, so surely we should leverage this and use it for language learning inside the class too.
We have to remember that using only audio in course books is very much down to the technological limitations of classrooms as they were a decade or so ago, nowadays most English school classrooms have screens and projectors and even when they don’t, students bring in smartphones capable of playing videos anyway.
Remember, audio only is not the most natural and authentic way of interacting with the language, non-verbal communication (things like gestures) plays a huge role in understanding, and technological progress means that even basic activities like talking on the phone are being replaced with Skype, Google Hangouts and tonnes of other video conferencing applications.
We know through research that using video over audio-only has a marked effect on students’ performance in listening and grammar scores in tests and generally offers more in terms of transferable skills, enhanced learning, increased motivation and easier and more interesting recycling.
So teachers should feel confident and comfortable in using short extracts to build their pupils’ basic skills in things like critical thinking, predicting and modelling through a medium that is both motivating and enhancing to the daily class structure, so that teachers will use video to prepare a general English lesson instead of preparing a separate video lesson.
And as these days students don’t have a problem accessing information, it’s all there at the flick of a finger or at the click of a button, what students struggle with is processing all this information and it’s here that video can be a great help.
Exposing students to the cultural elements from TikTok or YouTube provides them with input that can help them be more creative when discussing a topic, it provides them with different arguments that they must understand and then decide whether they agree with those arguments and help to establish their own point of view.
So hopefully, like me, you are excited about the changing nature of video and want to try and use it more frequently as a daily lesson tool to bring the course to life, helping it to become more motivating and challenging to your English students and to emphasize that what we are trying to do is teach them the skill of communication rather than the grammar of tests and that we can use a medium that the learners feel comfortable with (and we’ve already been using for years) to make it happen.
Phil first started working at Embassy when there was just one school in Hastings, back in 1990 – during his time there he has worked in many roles, from teacher to head of vacation education to teacher trainer and then finally over to Embassy Summer, where he has Academic Coordinator for UK schools since 2007.