By Paul Maglione, Co-founder English Attack!
In March of this year I had the privilege of giving a talk at the 35th International TESOL Greece Convention. I spoke about the growing use of video in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and gave a framework for its effective application based on what I have learned in the years since we launched our online “entertainment immersion learning” EFL platform, English Attack!, featuring lessons incorporating video clips from Hollywood movies, current TV series, chart-topping music videos, and television news items. I now have the further pleasure of elaborating on this subject in the pages of the TESOL Greece newsletter.
To start at the beginning, let’s ask ourselves: “Why video?” The answer is tied up in our biological makeup: the human brain is wired for noticing and interpreting changes in the visual landscape, even more than it is engineered to process sound. In early man, the ability to detect movement determined survival, both for avoiding danger and capturing animals for food, and thus it is movement that continues to trigger our most instinctive reactions today. The power of the moving visual stimulus has been further reinforced over the years by cultural constructions such as theatre, followed by television, followed by video delivered over the internet, which is today available anywhere, at any time, via a plethora of fixed and mobile devices.
Therefore, it is not surprising that such a powerful medium would eventually start to transform education. Today a very simple education-through-video online service like Khan Academy is used by over 10 million students per month viewing over 300 million lessons monthly.
In terms of the potential of video applied to teaching EFL, language learning researchers have begun to formalize the correlation to be found between high English language proficiency in countries having historically exposed their populations to undubbed English language television (the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Portugal) and low proficiency in those (much of Southern Europe) which have not. The conclusion makes perfect sense from a learning pedagogy standpoint: for learners not living in an English-speaking country, regular exposure to spoken English through video is the easiest, most effective way to create the neural pathways that facilitate language learning.
The first step in integrating video into your teaching of English is to decide whether to use “graded” (made-for-education) videos or instead to use authentic video content. Graded video can be tightly targeted at specific skills or tasks, and is typically created for specific proficiency levels. But it is often cruelly lacking in production values and entertainment appeal; and it can be perceived by learners as rather condescending, i.e. as “talking down” to them.
Authentic video, by contrast – such as clips from commercial films, TV series, or television news items – is better at sparking emotion, which of course creates the intellectual opening for learning to occur. The huge choice of available authentic video also means we can motivate anyone according to their interests. However, we must accept the fact that authentic video is impossible to shoehorn into structures originally devised for textbooks and graded texts, such as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Also, carelessly selected or improperly packaged authentic video can be too difficult for some learners, especially beginners.
Assuming the choice is made to use authentic video, a second decision has to be made: what subject matter? Experience indicates that clips from current movies are the most popular with learners, with clips from episodes of popular television series; music videos; and television news items also among learners’ favorites.
Next, we need to decide on the length of clip we want to use. If a clip is too short (less than 50 seconds or so) there is little chance to absorb dialogue in context. Clips that are too long (over five minutes) tend to contain too many linguistic elements, leading to a less effective learning experience. Our experience is that the ideal length of videos used for teaching EFL is between 1 and 3 minutes, which, not surprisingly for a world in which most learners are today digital natives, is about the average length of a YouTube video or a shared video on Facebook.
Our fourth task, and a crucial one, is to select a video of the appropriate difficulty level. Many elements enter into what constitutes “difficulty” in an authentic English language video, including subject matter (a scene of a man proposing marriage vs. an explanation of how to price financial derivatives); the complexity of vocabulary used (often but not always related to subject matter); speed of speech; clarity of speech (enunciation; background noise); neutral accent vs. a thick regional one; use of unfamiliar idioms or cultural references; use of slang; and the presence (or not) of visual clues and a situational context in the clip that can help learners negotiate meaning. Obviously, once we have selected a clip of the appropriate difficulty level, we then need to construct language exercises that are calibrated to that difficulty level: it’s not terribly useful focusing on the vocabulary item “house,” for example, in a video tagged for learners as Advanced.
Another consideration, and a controversial one, is whether or not to include subtitles to accompany the video. In terms of subtitles in English, these can help beginner-level learners with basic comprehension of the video, but carry the considerable disadvantage of leading the learners to “tune out” the audio in favor of reading (speech and text are processed by two different areas of the brain, and it is very difficult for a learner to focus actively on both simultaneously). In terms of subtitles in the learner’s L1, they are great… if you want learners to improve their L1 reading skills! Forcing a learner instead to try to make sense of a short video clip unassisted (and undistracted) by subtitles of any kind keeps intact the full emotional impact of the language input; concentrates the audio-processing centers of the brain; and has the added advantage of forcing the learner to look for visual clues (as well as audio ones, such as intonation) that can help with comprehension.
Lastly, there is the issue of whether, and when, to introduce a written transcript of the video. Here we must be very clear about the purpose of doing so: it should be to help the learners practice their reading skills in the context of the video, not to understand the gist of the video itself (conversations in English in real life are not accompanied by transcripts!). A write-up of the dialogue should thus be provided only sequentially, after listening skills have been covered, and can serve as an exercise to get learners used to scanning a text for detailed information (names, numbers or dates) or to focus on a given point of grammar or language usage.
Video clips from current or recent movies or popular television series are fun; they feature recognizable actors and situations and are great at creating engagement with learners of all ages. These attractions should not, however, obscure the need for a solid pedagogical structuring of the exercises.
The sequencing of a video-based lesson must be planned as carefully as any other lesson, with pre-video exercises; tasks immediately following a first or multiple viewings of the clip; and post-video tasks – for example, using the video as a jumping-off point for class discussion about the storyline or themes covered in the clip. Structuring the exercises is an opportunity to integrate best-practice pedagogy, such as immediate feedback (facilitated by online interactivity) and positive reinforcement; the use of scores instead of grades (thus integrating the motivational dynamics of gamification into the video lesson); providing supplemental resources where needed (contextual dictionaries and/or translation, again facilitated by online interactivity); and consolidating intake with repetition (via language games based on the video exercise, for example).
So, to conclude, a few points to keep in mind:
- Video is a powerful, emotive stimulus to language learning.
- Short-format authentic video without subtitles can be a highly motivational and effective pedagogical tool for helping build EFL/ESL competence and learner confidence.
- Video-based lessons need to be engineered just as carefully as any classroom lesson, with pre- and post-tasks and a natural flow from exposure and gist comprehension through to more detailed or nuanced skills.
- Specialist online learning platforms such as English Attack! package authentic video together with exercises to offer a huge choice of learning units of all difficulty levels across many topics and categories.
- The role of these platforms is to constitute a convenient, easy-to-use, and cost-effective supplemental resource to teachers for both in-class and out-of-class (homework assignment) language learning.
Biography of English Attack! Co-founder Paul Maglione
Paul Maglione was born in New York City, grew up in the United States, Italy and the Philippines, and holds degrees from Brown University in Rhode Island, USA and the London Business School in the UK. He also obtained a TEFL Certificate from Rutgers University.
Following an early career in journalism and magazine publishing, Paul moved into corporate communications and then television, where he helped establish NBC and CNBC in Europe before taking on senior management positions with Turner Broadcasting Europe and CNN International. He then moved to the videogames industry. He was in charge of marketing and publishing at Scottish mobile games pioneer i-Play, and then moved to Paris to become President of Vivendi Games Mobile. In early 2009 he began work on English Attack! with his co-founder at Entertainment Learning, Frederic Tibout. He is a regular speaker at TESOL and IATEFL national and international conferences as well as at technology start-up events.