Topics 2
Using original video and sound effects to teach English
Creative methods VS mechanical ones:
In my experience, teaching language skills through mechanical exercises and traditional fill-in-the-blank, true/ false, and multiple-choice assessments does not interest students as much as we expect. When I go creative, especially when teaching grammar, in a way students do not expect, I can clearly see the difference. Here is a wonderful method of teaching English.
Example of a grammar lesson:
I suggest a motivating way to teach grammar with audiovisual techniques, with an example of a lesson on teaching modals of speculation that express degrees of certainty (e.g., may, might, could, couldn’t).I produced a video to create a speculative context. I first asked someone to videotape me doing actions that generated different sounds while I was getting ready to leave the house for work.
These scenes included:
• brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush
• blow drying my hair
• ironing my clothes with steam
• using a whistling kettle to boil water
• pouring water into a cup
• toasting a piece of bread in the toaster
• leaving the tap dripping
• spraying air freshener
• leaving my cell phone ringing
• locking the door
• waiting for and entering an elevator
• turning on the ignition of the car.
Setting up the video lesson:
Harmer (2007, 310) suggests a variety of viewing techniques when using films and videos in listening activities, including:
• Silent viewing (playing the video without the sound)
• Freeze framing (freezing the picture and asking the students what they think will happen next)
• Partial viewing (covering most of the screen with a piece of paper)
• Picture or speech (half the class watches the video while the other half faces away).
• Subtitled films (students see and hear the English language)
• Picture-less listening (listening to the audio before watching the video). To awaken students’ curiosity, I made use of picture-less technique and had my students listen to the sound of the video first. To focus on modals of speculation, students listen and guess the origin of the sounds they hear in the video. This arouses their curiosity and invites them to speculate. I wanted to create a speculating environment.
Teaching the video lesson:
I played the first scene and asked them to guess what the sound
was. Then I continued, pausing at the end of each scene for about 15 seconds to allow them to make notes. I repeated this same process until they had listened to the whole video. Then I played the video again while they checked their notes. Next, students formed pairs and took three minutes to discuss their notes with their partner. Students enjoyed discussing their very different ideas about the origin of the sounds they had heard.By asking questions, I encouraged them to use the appropriate grammatical structures. For instance, when I played the part where I was blow drying my hair, I asked, “What could it be? Could it be a vacuum cleaner?” One student said, “Yes, it might be a vacuum cleaner,” whereas another one said, “No, it can’t be a vacuum cleaner.”
When they were not able to use the structure, I prompted them to use the modal construction by asking tag questions, such as “It can’t be a vacuum cleaner, can it?” In order to respond to my question, students had to use the teaching point.I elicited their answers—for example, “It might be a vacuum cleaner” or “It can’t be a washing machine”—and wrote them on the board. Then I underlined the “modal + verb to be” with another color to help them notice the new structure.
I continued the process about the origin of all the sounds in the
video, and I produced a list of their speculations on the board where the new structure and the modals were underlined and highlighted. Then I removed the newspaper from the TV screen and let them watch the entire video. This was the most interesting part of the lesson because the students had a lot of fun, laughing at some of their speculations.
Teaching grammar:
The same video can be used to teach different grammar points, such as present and past simple, present and past progressive, future simple, and “going to + infinitive” without to, all by using the technique of freeze framing. In order to teach grammar, you need to play the video, freeze framing the picture after each scene, and then ask questions. For instance, freeze frame the picture and ask your students questions like, “What is s/he doing?” “What did s/he do?” “What was s/he doing?” “What is s/he going to do next?” or “What will happen next?” In this way students will be prompted to use the teaching point. Once you elicit their answers, write them on the board and highlight the structure (e.g., “to be + ing” form of the verb for present progressive, or “will + infinitive” without to for future simple). Since the video consists of a sequence of action, adverbs like first, second, finally, before, and later can also be introduced to and practiced with students.
Teaching vocabulary:
The same video that I used with my students can be used to teach vocabulary items on home and kitchen appliances by recording sounds and having students guess the origin. Being careful to respect people’s privacy, you can also take the camera around the school, or even outside the school, and record a variety of interesting sounds. For instance, you can record the sound of students playing at recess, the period between classes, or sounds in the lunchroom and then play the video for your students and have them guess the source of the sound. Or you can record the sounds in a busy coffee shop, a nearby underground station, or a noisy shopping center and play
a guessing game with students.
Teaching writing:
The same video that I used in my class can be used as a visual prompt for writing assignments at different levels of English. As George (2002, 12) points out, “Our students have a much richer imagination for what we might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to address.” To use videos in the writing class, you can show the video to your students using the picture-less listening technique and ask them to write a story based
on the sounds they hear in the video.
Conclusion
Finding appropriate teaching materials is not that hard, as our everyday life serves as a perfect resource for creating effective lessons and activities. An effective lesson does not necessarily require expensive and high-tech materials; oftentimes, breaking the routines will excite students, engage them in the lesson, and teach them the real use of language in context.
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