Russell Stannard finds video sites that do more than entertain.
There is plenty of video content on the internet these days. I remember not that long ago it was much more difficult to find good videos online. Now we can be really choosy. We can find videos with subtitles, slowdown facilities and even some where we can record our own voices and compare our versions to the original.
www.englishcentral.com/en/home
I love this site. You can play good quality videos of a whole variety of genres from film trailers to recordings of motivational speakers (search by topic). You can listen with the subtitles on or off and you can record your voice in small chunks and then compare it to the real voices. The site even analyses your recording and points out where it differs from the original. If you sign up, you can go back to a recording that you haven’t completed and you also get a list of all the recordings you have worked on. There is a points system, too, so you can track your progress. My feeling is that the comparison tool is a little gimmicky because it depends very much on the accent and sounds produced in the original recording, but I do like the facility that allows you to record your own voice, especially as you can do it in segments.
The content is divided into three levels, so you are not restricted to searching by topic. This is a tool that you can make great use of in class, and also one that you can recommend to your students to use outside class.
Jamie Keddie, the man behind TEFL clips was a deserving winner at the 2009 British Council ELTons Awards. For each video clip on the site there is a whole lesson plan provided. These plans are well thought through and often include a nice variety of classroom techniques. The videos, which are listed with the lesson plans on the right-hand side, are very topical. You can also hunt for different genres, using the search facility. Sometimes it is not completely clear what level a particular video can be used with and I have to consult the teaching plans to see if it is suitable for my class. Usually the level information is provided at the top of the page. A huge amount of work has gone into this site and the lesson plans can save you a lot of time, so it is well worth looking at.
This is another good site that you can recommend to your students or use in class. It provides an embedded video and a series of comprehension questions – you can have your answers checked immediately at the bottom of the quiz. The quality of the content does vary somewhat, but that is to be expected with material that users have created for others. There is a lot of material on this site and you can even produce and add your own. You can simply embed a video from YouTube and then add a quiz to it. This is much simpler than you think, and the following video will take you through the whole process: www.eslvideo.com/eslvideo_how_to.php.
There are lots of songs on this site, too. So if you like using music in class and want some pre-prepared gap-fill activities, then this site is great for that. If you click on the ‘Quizzes’ button, you will see in the tabs underneath that are there lots of levels, starting from Beginning and going to High Intermediate. Many of the videos include scripts.
This interesting site does something quite different as it uses video to explain difficult words. It is a sort of video dictionary and is very easy to use. Just search through the alphabetical list for words or look at those displayed on the right-hand side. I like it because the videos are extremely thorough and really highlight the meaning of the word. This is an excellent tool for high-level students. You can even sign up to the site and receive a word a day (with video) by email.
http://en.yappr.com/welcome/HomePage.action
Finally, here is a site that I have mentioned before. It offers lots of material in English with subtitles and also has a ‘Clear’ button where the content is read out by a very good speech engine. The videos are organised into genres, and include songs and film clips. There are also some new sections, such as a pronunciation tool. You have to download this, but it allows you to listen to phrases and try to repeat them. It then gives you an analysis of your pronunciation. This is not an entirely free site, but plenty of the content is free and the joining fee is very reasonable. An alternative is http://dotsub.com, which is similar and, at present, offers all its content for free.
Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in ICT at the University of Westminster, UK. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology for his website www.teachertrainingvideos.com and was one of the winners of the 2010 British Council ELTons awards.
This article first appeared in issue 68 of English Teaching professional, May 2010.
