I’ve written a quick 3-page guide to using YouTube and TubeQuizard to help learners understand real-life pronunciation in videos.
Topics covered in the guide:
• how to find subtitled videos on YouTubes on any topic
• how to use YouTube functionality to create listening decoding activities
• how to use TubeQuizard.com to generate quizzes for subtitled YouTube videos, edit the quizzes if necessary, and look for videos that contain lots of examples of a certain grammar feature.
In the past, whenever I did a workshop on decoding authentic recordings with learners, I’d invariably hear this from someone in the room: ‘But surely this is only for advanced learners??’
In my experience, you can certainly do decoding with Pre-Intermediate learners and higher, so I thought I’d record a snippet with my new group, which is B1. We’re doing listening decoding for the first time with this group in this lesson.
Before this part of the lesson, we watched four 30-second authentic videos for gist (these were videos showing small talk, and the task was to identify the topic discussed). The learners are now working with a gapped transcript, transcribing questions and responses from the video.
All in all, we spent 19 minutes doing listening decoding in that lesson: 14 minutes transcribing and then 3 minutes summarizing the features we’d heard. We then moved on to categorize the questions and have a bit of practice making small talk.
I generally try to incorporate listening decoding in this way every 2-3 lessons, and I also set TubeQuizard quizzes based on the same video for homework. And I normally start noticing progress in my learner’s ability to cope with ‘standard’ AmE accents after about 5-6 lessons that have a listening decoding element.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post (the recording of a webinar on Practical activities for teaching listening decoding skills, which was part of last year’s Electronic Village Online session on teaching listening), here are some links to activities that I collected for the session participants. These were meant as highly practical resources that could help the session participants to try out listening decoding in class. There are three sections:
activities that could be adapted to a wide range of listening texts
video extracts from lessons
materials and excerpts from published books that you could try out.
SECTION A: activities that could be adapted to a wide range of listening texts
Olya Sergeeva describes the lesson procedure that she uses in herAuthentic listening courses with learners at B1 level and higher. The procedure could be used with any subtitled video stored locally on your computer, a TED talk or a subtitled YouTube video.
If you’re interested in this approach, you can also see a recording of a full lesson and sample materials in sections B and C.
Annie McDonald describes six activities that require little preparation and can be used with coursebook or authentic texts (files Decoding activities.pdf and the audio files). Activities iii.2 and iii.3 can be used with audio concordancing software (e.g. TubeQuizard or Aegisub).
Anthony Schmidt describes a grammar listening discrimination activity that he created using playphrase.me, an audio concordancing service that uses snippets from TV shows. The blog post includes a PowerPoint with listening files downloaded from playphrase.me and a worksheet that can be tried out in class. Anthony’s PowerPoint activity is for B2 levels, but the activity can be adapted to all levels.
Michael Grinberg describes a listening activity that could be used with any audio or video, provided that you have a transcript. There’s no preparation required, but you’ll need software that allows to isolate and play short extracts from the video (such as Aegisub).
If you’re interested in Michael’s approach and want find out more about the research behind this activity, please feel free to get in touch with him here.
Gianfranco Conti describes some micro-listening activities that he likes to use with beginner students.
7. Look through sample units in coursebooks produced by Sheila Thorn to get more ideas for listening decoding tasks (unfortunately, the audio files for these activities are not available).
Link 1: sample units for elementary, intermediate and advanced books in the Real Lives Real Listening series.
Link 2: sample units from another book produced in collaboration with Richard Cauldwell (scroll down to Writing project with Richard Cauldwell of Speech in Action).
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SECTION B: videos of teachers demonstrating listening decoding work in class
1. A video lesson (30 minutes) in which Rachael Roberts demonstrates working on intrusive w, j and r.
The lesson comes from Nagivate Pre-Intermediate (B1) coursebook (Oxford University Press).
If you like the lesson and want to try it out with your learners, you’ll find the link to the materials in SECTION C.
2. A video (13 minutes) in which Mark Rooney demonstrates how listening decoding diagnostics and training could be introduced into any listening lesson through a few simple tweaks.
3. A lesson snippet (6 minutes) in which Julia Galichanina helps learners (B1+) analyze the speaker’s pronunciation in an authentic listening extract.
In this lesson extract,
(1) the teachers uses Aegisub to play one sentence from the video. The learners listen to the sentence several times and try to fill the gaps in the transcript
(2) the teacher elicits all learners’ ideas and boards them
(3) the teacher tells the learners the answers, and then replays the extract for the learners to analyze how the words in the gap were actually pronounced by the speaker;
(4) after this, the procedure is repeated with the next sentence.
This lesson was an introduction into listening decoding for this group of learners, who had never done this kind of work before. This particular group is Upper-Intermediate (B1+), but Olya has also done the same procedure (with different videos) with B1 groups.
If you want to try this out, the materials are in SECTION C and Olya’s article about this approach is in SECTION A.
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SECTION C: materials (e.g. coursebook samples) that you can try out with your learners
1. A lesson (levels: strong B1 and higher) by Olya Sergeeva designed to raise the learners’ awareness of features of connected speech and the role they have in listening. The material is based on a subtitled YouTube interview and includes TubeQuizard quizzes.
2. A sample lesson from Navigate Pre-Intermediate (B1) by Rachael Roberts (free but registration required).
3. During his live session in Week 4, Richard Cauldwell spoke about and demonstrated a classroom activity ‘Jungle Listening: Survival Tip No. 10‘. Here you can download the Student’s book, Teacher’s book, and Audio for all ten units in these materials. Level: B1.
If you use Survival Tip no. 10 – or any of the other nine tips – in class, do get in touch with Richard to let him know how it went. You don’t have to be polite! If you do not like the materials, say why (it will be helpful for Richard). Also, if you like them, say why (which will also be helpfuul to Richard!)
4. A sample lesson on decoding weak forms of function words (levels: B1-B2) from Authentic Listening Resource Pack by Marck Hancock and Annie McDonald.
6. TubeQuizard offers a selection of YouTube-based listening decoding activities. You can use the selection of ready-made quizzes or create quizzes based on any subtitled YouTube videos. Find a 12-minute tutorial here.
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I hope you find this useful – if you think I’m missing a good resource, could you share the link?
Exciting news! My husband Kirill Sukhomlin and I were delighted to find out that our service TubeQuizard has been shortlisted for this year’s ELTons award in the category of Digital Innovation! ELTons are the only international awards that recognise and celebrate innovation in English language teaching (ELT), and getting shortlisted is a true honour.
TubeQuizard, as we dubbed it, is a true labour of love for me: a few years back I had an idea that I was very passionate about and really wanted to implement, then a developer in a company I’d just joined offered a hand, then we worked and worked and worked like crazy, and then we ended up falling in love and eventually got married.
The last few months have been hectic for our family, but we continue working on the service. I’m very happy that it’s turning out useful to people, and I feel very grateful – to British Council for shortlisting us, to people who have been spreading the word writing about it or mentioning it in their conference talks, and especially to our users who have been giving us lots of invaluable feedback and suggesting ideas how to improve the service.
They asked us to produce a 30 second video about the service for the award ceremony – here goes!
This is one more post in my series of posts about the EVO 2017 session on teaching listening. In this post I want to summarize one more issue that was raised during the session: the use of authentic materials with lower levels.
Below you’ll find some of the ideas and experiences that the teachers participating in the session shared:
Watching short clips for fun
Using songs
Grading the task by using the material as a warmer or a lead in
Micro listening: focus on grammar
Vox pop videos for word hunt or micro listening
Watching the video without the sound
Some thoughts on the role of assessment and a case study: following a news story
Authentic listening (and speaking) out of class
But first, let’s look at some pros and cons of using authentic materials with lower levels.
A lot of the session participants voiced concerns about using authentic materials with lower level learners, such as:
it takes a lot of time to find extracts that lower level learners would have any chance of coping with;
even with these extracts, the learners are often frustrated that they don’t understand much;
one often hears ‘grade the task not the text’. But what are some examples of graded tasks? And won’t it happen that we’ve graded the task, but the learners fail their ‘inner task’ of understanding more or less everything, and still feel frustrated?
So do lower level learners need to work with authentic materials at all? Here are some reasons why they do:
the learners might be exposed to authentic materials outside class (especially in ESL / business Engish settings, but also on the Internet and while they travel) – they need to prepare for that in the safe classroom environment;
coping in some way with authentic materials gives tremendous sense of achievement to lower level students
using authentic materials in class will give the learners the courage to try to ‘get out there’ and start practicing out of class, which is great for language acquisition. This will be especially useful if we discuss with the learners specific ideas where they might find suitable materials and what they could do with them.
So what are some sources of lower level materials, and how can we use them in class?
1. Watching short clips for fun
Oksana Kirsanova, an English teacher from Russia, encourages her learners simply to watch very simple funny videos like the one below.
The video could be shown in class or shared with the learners to watch at home. The learners watch for enjoyment – Oksana sets no task. If the video contains a lot of dialogue, she finds a version with Russian subs.
This is a very simple way to introduce the learners to authentic materials. You probably know a lot of good videos already (who hasn’t shown Elevenof We’re sinkingat some point in class?) but it’s worth building a bigger collection and showing/sharing the videos regularly throughout the course. One good source of such videos is funny commercials. There are lots of compilations on YouTube – if only some commercials in a compilation are appropriate, use TubeChop.com to isolate and share only those bits you want to share (here’s an example of a clips isolated with TubeChop).
2. Using songs
This can be extremely motivating for learners, especially teens (but not only)! There are lots of songs that are suitable for lower levels because the pronunciation is very clear. Again, it’s worth building up a collection to use throughout the course (or Google some ready-made collections, like this one). There are two challenges: doable tasks and finding songs that are relevant for the learners.
Some ideas for tasks:
Svetlana Bogolepova (Russia) got her learners to listen to Yesterday by Beatles and clap every time they heard the word ‘yesterday’ – which is a very simple activity that encourages the learners to notice the words they know in songs. I think this kind of activity could be a great lead-in (or warmer / filler) to some topics dealt with at Elementary level (e.g. adverbs of time or past simple).
We got more examples of tasks to be used with songs from this article by Nik Peachey on A framework on planning a listening skills lesson (scroll to ‘Applying the framework to a song’). Some of the tasks that Nik offers are:
listening to the song and deciding if it’s happy or sad;
listening and ordering jumbled up lyrics;
listening and correcting mistakes in a summary of the song pre-written by a teacher.
Regarding the question of finding relevant songs, I’d predict this would be a real issue with teens, who might not be very motivated by having to listen to, say, Abba! I think the best idea with learners who feel strongly about this is to involve them in creating/maintaining a list of songs with clear pronunciation. The learners could be encouraged to maintain a Padlet.com board like this one curated by Teaching English – British Council.
3. Grading the task by using the material as a warmer or a lead in
One of the concerns that the participants of the EVO raised was that the learners are bound to understand little in authentic materials, which will frustrate them. One way to help learners feel more OK with the fact that they don’t understand everything is to use the material not as the main listening text in the lesson, but as a warmer, setting a task that the learners could cope with.
E.g. with the following video the learners could
watch the video and guess the topic of the lesson (food)
watch the video and note down all foods they could see
a word hunt activity: watch the video and note down all food-related vocabulary they heard someone say
4. Micro listening: focus on grammar
This is something I love doing with my lower level students: using video compilations that show lots of examples of just one grammar point, like this one:
I normally do this as a part of a grammar lesson, asking the learners to fill the gaps the transcript:
1. Spider-Man ________ hero.
2. ______ ready? ______ born ready.
3. A hundred years ago, ______ one and a half billion people on Earth.
4. Exactly! ______ a worker, but now _______ war hero!
5. Oh, right! _______ my sister.
6. But ______ young and proud!
You’ll find the end of this exercise and a lot more links to such videos in this blog post.
A big issue is that these videos come with hard-coded subs. I dealt with this simply by dragging some kind of window, e.g. an open notepad document, over the subs area.
Another issue that one session participant raised was that these extracts are decontextualized. I think that that’s not much of a problem, because the visual element is so rich it provides micro context – notice how the feeling that one gets watching these videos is very different from if you were listeningto the extracts.
5. Vox pop videos for word hunt or micro listening
Another source of videos that are ideal for word hunt or micro listening, because they naturally provide multiple examples of the same language feature, are so called vox pop videos (videos in which people in the street get asked the same question – normally there are two or three questions per video).
I’ve found several sources of such videos:
Speakout video podcasts for all levels, including Starter and Elementary, freely available on their site. For example, the learners could watch the following video and note down all family vocabulary they can hear (word hunt) or count the number of times the word ‘my’ is used (this could lead to a micro ‘pronunciation for listeners’ activity, as ‘my’ is often pronounced as ‘mu’):
Real English videos uses the same idea. E.g. in this video people in the streets say how old they are – the learners could listen and note down the numbers they hear
Vox Pop International, an authentic YouTube channel, also contains some videos suitable for lower levels. E.g. watching this video the learners could note down all adverbs of frequency they hear:
If you are subscribed to onestopenglish, they recently created Live from London, a great collection of such videos with worksheets and transcripts. Here’s a sample video, with ideas how it can be used with Pre-Intermediate learners and higher.
If you want to try how listening to such videos feels, why not try this video in Mandarin Chinese shared by Curt Ford, another EVO participant:
What I like about vox pop videos is that they’re so adaptable to a range of activities: while they could easily be used for a quick micro-listening activity or a ‘word hunt’ warmer as described above, they could also be used in the traditional gist – details – follow-up lesson shape:
Stage 1: the teacher board the two or three questions asked in the video on the board, uses tubechop to play the corresponding two or three extracts in which people answer the questions, the learners watch and match the extracts to the questions (Variation for a higher level group: the learners watch and guess the questions).
Stage 2: the learners do a micro-listening (fill in gaps focusing on one grammar feature) or a word hunt activity.
Stage 3: the questions are used for a speaking activity (either in pairs or mingling).
6. Watching the video without the sound
Heather McKay shared an activity that helps the learners to draw on the paralinguistic features in the clip (body language, context, facial expressions, etc). Before watching the clip with the sound, she plays it several times without the sound, for the learners to draft the dialogue/share their predictions with each other.
Here’s a sample clip she has used this approach with:
7. Some thoughts on the role of assessment and a case study: following a news story
Two session participants, Tanja Debevc and Keith Murdiff, reported on their experience of what happens when authentic materials become part of the end-of-course exam. They have experienced a real positive backwash, as both the teachers and the learners want to target the type of material that the learners will be assessed with. A big challenge is, of course, designing graded exam tasks that the learners would cope with. Tanja shared a link to a book which features exam tasks for lower levels based on authentic materials.
What is more, their experience shows that the learners cope with a lot more than we assume they might cope with. In particular, Keith prepares his learners for an exam in which they need to follow a news story. This is why one of the tasks he sets to his learners is to choose a news story and listen to all news they can find related to the story (online and on the radio) over a period of time. Keith’s experience is that the learners have a lot of context (as he puts it, context is king), the learners are able to cope with, benefit from and enjoy difficult listening texts and discern a lot of detail. The learners are provided with a worksheet that focuses on story-key vocabulary, main actors and their role in the story, predictions on how the story will develop and a summary of the news. The learners use this framework to follow up on their listening in class, sharing with other class members.
8. Authentic listening (and speaking) out of class
I think that the idea for getting the learners to follow a news story outlined above exemplifies two key ingredients for encouraging listening to authentic materials out or class: the learners need specific ideas what to listen/watch and they need very specific tasks to do while they listen.
Recently I attended a webinar on encouraging learner autonomy by David Nunan in which he shared a number of case studies from a book they’d published a year ago. One of the stories he shared really brought home for me how important it is for the learners to be helped both with the ideas what to listen to and the tasks – I want to share it here albeit this story goes beyond the topics of listening and using authentic materials with lower levels.
In one of the case studies presented by Nunan Mark Cadd, a researcher, was looking into the problem that many students who come back from a summer abroad don’t seem to have improved their language skills that much. The reason is often that they tended to spend time with other students studying a language but they weren’t interacting with the target community.
So he set up a program in which the learners were required, through 12 contact tasks, to interact with local residents and report her reflection back to the teachers.
Sample task
Task: attend a festival or another public event celebrated in the culture. Speak with at least two members of the culture who are present. Choose two who are quite different, e.g. young vs old, male vs female, etc. Ask why the event is important.
Reflection: Which festival, fair, public event etc did you investigate? What is its history? Did you learn anything meaningful about the culture? If so, what? Did you notice any difference between your style of communication and theirs? If so, what were they? Did you have problems understanding them? If so, what did you do about it?
Reflection needed to be posted to a website available to the teacher and other students.
Cadd found that the fact that they were required to do these tasks was initially challenging and scary for the learners, but over time they found that their anxiety lowered and their confidence, fluency and cultural sensitivity improved. Furthermore, they were able to make connections between what they learned in the classroom and the language they were using out of the classroom.
This story made me think of my recent week-long visit to Germany: I love the language but I didn’t practice it at all. I thought how much easier it would be for me to strike up conversations and take advantage of the language environment if I was on a mission to collect evidence for a project – this would not only give me ideas what to look out for and what to talk about, but also serve as a passable conversation starter, and I would feel a lot less self conscious about asking people questions. I think this idea could and should be applied to the wider issue of scaffolding the learners’ interaction with the target culture, whether they live in a country where their target language is spoken, or interact with the culture on the Internet.
If you’d like to provide your learners with a ‘menu’ of resources they could explore out of class, you could find some useful links on this list that the participants of the EVO session complied – but we didn’t work on a menu of autonomous activities.
All in all, I’m extremely grateful to the participants of the #listeningEVO for the wealth of ideas they’ve shared on this topic. There’s everything here I could wish for: from really simple activities to help introduce authentic materials and build the learners’ confidence, to evidence that it’s possible to plunge the learners at the deep end, provided they get scaffolding and that the institution supports this with higher level decisions such as the contents of the exams. Lots to think about and try out in class.
In this 12 minute tutorial I demonstrate
(1) how to use quizzes on tubequizard.com
(2) how to create your own quizzes based on any subtitled YouTube video
(3) how to look for YouTube videos that contain high quality subtitles (i.e. subtitles that are not automatically generated).
Here’s a quick (8 minutes to be exact) video tutorial on how to use Aegisub to work on listening decoding skills. I created this tutorial for our EVO session on teaching listening, but decided to post it here on my blog too, because, although I’ve already mentioned this tool in a couple of posts, I have a feeling that a demonstration might be worth a dozen screenshots.
In the tutorial I mentioned that you need a video and subtitles stored locally on your computer. I used a video and subs downloaded from MIT OpenCourseWare. Another way to get a video with subtitles is to choose a subtitled YouTube video and download the video and the subs using http://keepvid.com/.
The first week of the Electronic Village Online is in full swing! I’m co-moderating the session on teaching listening, and this week, under the guidance of Lizzie Pinard, we’ve started out with the topic of encouraging learner autonomy.
One great thing about online sessions like this one is that there are a lot of participants who share a wealth of tips about the activities and resources they use. From what I’ve read in our discussion threads, it seems that a lot of teachers encourage their learners to watch TED talks out of class, and the participants have suggested a variety of ideas for activities based on the talks.
What also often happens, however, is that the teacher recommends this resource but the learners don’t start using it – and the teacher kind of knows that they don’t, but they don’t even ask because that would be admitting failure (oh haven’t I been there a lot of times?) Below are my takeaways for how to avoid this problem and really help the learners start watching the talks out of class and get the most out of them
First of all, in her live session Lizzie offered some tips how to encourage the learners to start learning out of class in general:
provide the learners with a concrete ‘menu’ of things they can do out of class (a handout), because otherwise the learners will feel overwhelmed with the variety of resources out there;
educate the learners about the ways we learn languages (e.g. in class after we do a task, spend a few minutes discussing why it was done that way. One example is activating schemata before listening: the teacher could ask the learners to recall what the learners had done before listening, and then discuss how that task helped them to understand more). In general, the more insight the learners have into the way languages are learnt, the more responsibility they will be able to take and the more efficiently they will be able to spend their out-of-class English time. For the same reason, in the ‘menu’ mentioned above it’s important to provide the learners with concrete ideas for activities that they can do while watching the videos.
make learner autonomy a social experience: if you have lessons twice a week, devote 5 minutes every week to discussing in small groups what the learners have done out of class. At the beginning, predictably, a lot of them will be saying, ‘nothing’, but that doesn’t mean that the autonomy scheme isn’t working – the most important thing is to persevere
So, if we get back to TED talks, this means that
the learners need to try out a range of activities that they can use while watching TED talks;
they need opportunities to reflect about the effectiveness of these activities for their language learning;
they need the social experience of discussing the talks they’d watched out of class.
Below I outline ten ideas for tasks based on TED talks
Mind map the talk
Take notes using Cornell note-taking grid
Evaluate your level using a CEFR descriptor
Notice and learn key lexis in the talk
Work on your fluency using the 4-3-2 technique
Improve your listening and pronunciation by shadowing the speaker
Practice listening intensively with TubeQuizard
Analyze the speaker’s accent using TubeChop
Explore the talks on learning languages
Negotiate!
NB To make this list easier to use, I decided to outline sample procedures – they might be quite different from the procedures used by the teachers who suggested the activity.
Before I describe the ideas themselves, here are some tips that work with all these ideas:
Introduce the activities over a period of time, one at a time
Always model the activity in class before assigning it for homework
After you model the activity get the learners to recall what they just did and discuss how this procedure helps them to learn the language. The more the learners understand about the way languages are learnt, the more responsibility they will be able to take for their learning.
When you assign the activity for homework, provide the learners with written instructions (e.g. a handout or instructions posted in the learners’ online space).
The easiest way to follow up on the activities done out of class is to get the learners to
(1) retell the talk they’d watched to a partner (if the activity involved producing notes, they can use their notes while they’re retelling) and
(2) get the learners to discuss what they felt while doing the activity and whether they feel it has learning value for them.
When the learners have tried out quite a few activities, reduce the amount of scaffolding to encourage autonomy: let them choose for themselves which tasks they’re going to do while watching the talks (and maybe negotiate with the group how often they’re going to report back to the class, etc).
Mind map the talk
Svetlana Bogolepova from Russia asks her students to analyze the structure of the TED talks they’ve watched and create a mind map of the talk.
Intro lesson:
Choose a (short) TED talk.
Do a topic-related warmer, and then tell the learners that they’re going to watch and analyze the structure of the talk. Tell them a one-sentence summary (e.g. ‘In this talk the person speaks about his experience doing something new for 30 days’) and ask the learners to predict what sub-topics the speaker is going to mention, e.g. why he did this? what things did he do for 30 days?
The learners watch to check their predictions and then discuss in pairs. As a follow-up, the teacher boards their suggestions in the form of a mind map. The learners copy the mind map.
The learners watch again and add details to the mind map, compare their mind maps in pairs and report back to the whole class.
Finally, the learners
recall the procedure of the task (predicting the content, watching the talk once to identify the main points and putting them in writing, watching the talk a second time to note down details)
brainstorm the benefits of each step (e.g. predicting the content will allow you to ‘activate’ topic vocabulary).
A sample mind-map:
At home
The learners find an interesting talk and create a mind map that reflects the structure of the talk.
Optionally, they upload a picture of the mind map to the group’s online space.
Follow-up
In pairs, the learners retell the content of the talk they’ve seen to a partner who hasn’t seen the talks (using their mind map), and discuss the talks.
Take notes using Cornell note-taking grid
This idea was shared by Jennifer Rueda from the United States. She gets her learners to reflect on the talks they watch by using the Cornell note-taking technique.
Ask the learners how they usually take notes. How useful are their notes? Do they ever re-read them?
Tell the learners that they’ll try a new method called Cornell note-taking. Elicit what they know already about the method. Then give them an article that explains the method, e.g. this one. Get the learners to read the article and, in pairs, (1) compare how they understood the article (2) brainstorm 2-4 advantages and 1-2 disadvantages of the system.
Get the learners to draw the Cornell grid, watch a short TED talk and write their notes in the right-hand column. The learners compare in pairs and then fill out the rest of the grid. In new pairs, the learners compare their grids and discuss if they think this method is useful
At home (instructions for the learners):
Choose a TED talk, watch it and complete a Cornell grid.
[Optionally] upload a picture of their grid to the group’s online space
Follow-up lesson
In pairs, the learners show each other their grids, briefly retell the summary of the article and discuss whether they would like to continue using this note-taking method.
Evaluate your level using a CEFR descriptor
Sidney Martin Mota from Tarragona offers a variety of listening tasks for his learners to do autonomously (suggesting they watch news and TV shows, as well as TED talks), and links each task to the appropriate CEFR descriptor for the learners’ target level, e.g. a B2 descriptor for TED talks will be ‘I can follow the essentials of lectures, talks and report and other forms of complex academic or professional presentation in my field’.
At home
The learners watch the talk and rate their performance of the descriptor on the scale of 1 to 5.
Follow-up lesson
The learners briefly share what their talk was about,
The learners report on how well they understood the talk
The teacher elicits and boards what kinds of problems prevented the learners from understanding the talk (e.g. insufficient vocabulary, etc)
In small groups, the learners discuss what activities they can do to work on overcoming the problems
Notice and learn key lexis in the talk
Pomilla Agarwal from India suggested a task in which the learners note down key expressions from the talk and then retell the talk using the expressions.
Intro lesson
Choose a short TED talk. Do a warmer, then set a gist task (e.g. the learners predict the content of the talk based on the title and then watch to check their predictions)
Open the interactive transcript (either on TED or on Youtube). Choose a collocation that is key to the talk (e.g. ‘do a challenge’). Board the sentence containing the collocation with some parts of the expression gapped out. Ask the learners what’s in the gap, then play the line for the learners to check. Play the line a few more times for them to notice the pronunciation of the expression and practice saying it together with the speaker.
Refer the learners to the transcript and ask them two find 5-10 more expressions that are key to the text. Monitor to encourage them to notice more than one word (e.g. if they choose a noun, prompt them to look for the verb that goes with the noun).
Board the expressions that the learners have chosen. If there are too many, the learners choose which ones to wipe out.
Find the expressions in the interactive transcript to analyze and copy pronunciation.
Get the learners to summarize the talk using the expressions on the board (step 1: in writing; step 2: orally).
At home (instructions for the learners):
Find an interesting TED talk and watch it.
Look through the transcript and find 5-10 expressions that will help you summarize the talk. Try to look for multi-word expressions that you already understand but don’t use.
Use the interactive transcript to play the expressions; try to speak with the speaker to copy the pronunciation.
Practice giving a summary of the talk using the expressions.
Follow-up lesson
The learners briefly report on the talk they’ve seen using the expressions they’ve chosen.
Work on your fluency using the 4-3-2 technique
In this task, the learners retell the talk 3 times, each time speaking faster (this is an activity that I really enjoyed doing with a group of teens).
At home (instructions for the student):
This task is a great way to work on your fluency.
Find a TED talk that is interesting for you, watch it and take brief notes.
Retell the talk in 4 minutes
Check that you haven’t forgotten any important ideas by briefly looking through the transcript of the talk (alternatively, you could watch the talk one more time)
Retell the talk one more time, this time in 3 minutes. You’re working on fluency, so your goal is to retell the talk as fully as possible, but speak faster than last time.
Briefly look through the transcript again, and then retell the talk one more time, this time in 2 minutes. Again, your goal is to speak even faster than last time.
[optionally] Record the final attempt and upload it to the group’s online space.
Follow-up lesson:
In pairs, the learners retell the talk they’ve seen to their partner in 2 minutes. After that, allow a few more minutes to discuss the talks.
Classroom alternative:
The learners watch the talks at home. After that, in class, they retell the talk they’d seen to a partner in 4 minutes. They change partners and retell it one more time in 3 minutes – don’t forget to explain the goal to them and stress that they need to speak faster. Finally, they retell the talk one more time to a new partner in two minutes.
Improve your listening and pronunciation by shadowing the speaker
This was the idea suggested by Lizzie that a lot of the session participants want to try out (especially since quite a few already have, successfully, either with their learners or as language learners).
In this (challenging) task the learners listen to an extract from the talk and simultaneously speak with the speaker, trying to copy their pronunciation. Read this post for the detailed procedure.
Practice listening intensively with TubeQuizard
At home (instructions for the learners, but first demonstrate the tool in class):
Find a talk that has English subtitles on Youtube. The talks with subtitles are labelled ‘CC’.
To check that the talk has English subtitles, click on ‘More’ under the video, choose ‘Transcript’ and look for ‘English’ (not ‘English – Automatic captions’).
Watch the first 2-3 minutes of the talk without the subtitles for general understanding to make sure the topic is interesting for you.
Copy the Youtube URL of the talk. Go to http://www.tubequizard.com/add_quiz.phpand insert the URL into the ‘Youtube video URL‘ field:
Choose and do at least do 3-5 quizzes. While you’re doing a quiz, do you notice any features of the pronunciation of the grammar structure in the gaps? (E.g. how is ‘was’ pronounced in past continuous phrases? What happens to the ‘-ed’ endings of verbs in past simple?)
Finally, watch the talk from the beginning to the end. (Click here to see the quizzes in the picture below.)
Follow-up lesson
The learners retell the talk they’d watched to a partner and discuss the talk. They also share what grammar structures they listened to and what they noticed about the pronunciation of these structures.
Analyze the speaker’s accent using TubeChop
Maren Behrend from New Zealand gets her learners to improve their listening skills by transcribing a 30-60 second extract from the video and then using the transcript to check their work and analyze the speaker’s pronunciation, e.g. the weak sounds.
At home (instructions for the learners, but first model in class!)
Choose a TED talk with subtitles (see screenshots above).
Watch the first 1-3 minutes to make sure the video is interesting
If you feel that you need training in understanding the speaker’s accent, transcribe 3-4 sentences and analyze the speaker’s pronunciation. This is easier to do if you can replay a very short extract from the video. In order to do that, copy Youtube URL of your video, go to TubeChop, insert the URL and click ‘chop it’. Choose a random 5-6 second extract from the video:
Listen to the extract. If you can understand every word, choose another extract. If you can’t understand every word, click ‘chop it’ and you’ll get to the following window where you can replay any part of your 5-6 second extract (click here to try an example)
Listen to the extract 4-10 times and write exactly what you hear. Go back to youtube, open the interactive transcript and find the extract in the transcript. With a different pen, copy the words that you didn’t catch.
Listen to the extract again on Tubechop and try to hear exactly how the speaker pronounces all words (to do that, replay individual words). Listen for
Repeat with 5-10 extracts, adding new words to the grid. Finally, watch the talk – after the work you’ve done, you should understand the speaker’s accent a lot better.
Explore the talks on learning languages
Anastasiia Gubarenko from Russia suggests to her learners that they watch videos that might actually help them turn into better learners (e.g. talks on how to become self-motivated)!
Also, the learners might benefit from watching the talks about strategies for learning languages autonomously.
Intro lesson:
Get the learners to discuss their language learning biography so far. When were they learning a language the most effectively? How? What approaches to learning haven’t worked for them?
Follow-up lesson
The learners retell the talks in groups of three and compare:
What ideas did all speakers mention?
Did any of the speakers contradict each other?
The teacher elicits and boards the ideas. The learners discuss which ones they’d like to try out and how they’d like to try them out (e.g. what will be the completion criteria? what are the best ways to incorporate these ideas into your existing life style?)
Negotivate!
This was an idea that Jenny Wright came up with: once the learners have been exposed to a range of strategies, they could negotiate which talk (or a different resource) they will all watch next week and/or which combination of activities they will do. I think this is a wonderful idea because this seems to be a very natural way to get the learners to talk about the educational value of the activities.
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Upd. Here’s one more option, suggested by Ron Morrain: Read an article related to the topic before listening to the TED Talk. Discuss (in a group) the answers to some questions related to the topic before listening to the talk.
How about you – what are your favourite tasks to do with TED talks?
I’ve mentioned before on this blog that for those of my listening lessons in which the learners focus on decoding skills (i.e. transcribe part of the text and then actively analyze the speakers’ actual pronunciation), I vastly prefer to work with video and subs stored locally on my computer, because this allows me to use Aegisub to replay any word or phrase I wish. In my experience, hearing words in isolation makes it significantly easier for the learners to hear their actual pronunciation – the weak forms, elision, catenation and all the other features of connected speech.
I’ve just learned that This American Life, one of my favourite radio shows, has implemented a similar feature on their site.
If you click on ‘CUT THIS’, this opens up the transcript, where you can select any portion of the text and play it with word precision.
The transcript is also searchable and long, so for instance if the learners couldn’t catch ‘used to’ from the first listen, there are eight more examples in this transcript alone for them to listen to and train catching (I normally turn this into a separate activity that follows the diagnostic transcription activity).
Not only this, they’ve also made it possible to share the snippet on social media or even to download it perfectly legally, e.g. if you want to create a listening gapfill (like this really nice listening discrimination activity by Anthony Schmidt).
And the best bit is that the listening material itself on This American Life is usually amazing – great human interest stories that a lot of teachers use anyway regardless of technology. Can’t wait to show this to my learners!
Olya Sergeeva's ELT blog 