I reviewed two videos using YouTube.
The first one is in a language I am not very familiar with--ASL, or American Sign Language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cayMkVidpc&sns=em
ASL is great for video since it is 100 percent visual. I thought that I couldn't go wrong with any video that I watched since it's visual, right? I found that the answer wasn't as simple as I had thought. First off, all of the expertvillage ASL videos are incorrectly--I was excited to learn the word for mother and father, and instead learned how to say I stopped the clock yesterday, sorry. I found the woman to be easy to follow, If I were a student, I would have felt good about everything this woman was telling me. She was slow, clear, and even though I questioned her methods (or lack thereof) of chunking relevant materials, I felt success at the end of several 2 minute sements. And then I read user comments like this lady doesn't know what she's doing, her As and Gs are all wrong, go back to school, etc. It made me realize that as a student, this is a GREAT medium...as long as you have someone to guide you toward high quality material. Perhaps this is the use of teacher playlists?
The second video I watched was clearly marked: Listening, vocab with quiz! English meeting lesson-Air Force One.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzSMvNjit5I&sns=em
Since the video first starts with this guy pretending to be the president of the USA, my first thought was, oh man this guy is cheesy! But I figured he had 9 minutes to get more interesting, so I kept watching. The intro ended up fitting well with the theme of a visit to the Ronald Reagan Library. After the cheesiness and before the footage of the library, he introduced a few vocabulary words that he thought might be useful for students. Once the footage of the library started, he used natural (non-ESL) speech to talk about interesting things that he saw at the library. He followed this segment up with a series of questions that seemed to be geared towards students taking notes on what they thought were the main ideas. I really liked the first 7 minutes of this video--I thought that even though the intro was silly, it kept my attention and made me have some fun with it. I could not see using the whole 9 minutes of this, but I thought that the visit to the library might provide good footage for intermediate students who are in an EAP class learning how to take notes.
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1 year ago
I had the same thought, what a cheese ball! I do agree, what a fun way to learn English and even get a little history or cultural lesson. He spoke slowly enough for students to follow and in the beginning showed potential problem words with their definitions. It might have been a good idea to go back to them in the end for a review. I also liked how at the end he asked questions about the video to test comprehension as well.
ReplyDeleteI know, right? He has a bunch of videos online that people must watch, though (otherwise why make them, right?).
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out the importance of knowing your source as a language learner in the ASL video. There are a lot of websites and podcasts out there and it's important for us as teachers to point our students in the right direction so they don't pick up bad habits or learn wrong concepts.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a well-ordered lesson. Makes me wonder if topic-specific vocabulary lessons aren’t the way to go; I like the cultural lesson infused with vocab here. And yes, this guy is really, really cheesy.
ReplyDelete