5. VIDEO CONTENT FOR ENGLISH COMMUNICATION

Since the school has a language laboratory with four television screens I was eager to try teaching using video. I have seen video used very successfully in the elementary schools but the middle school curriculum hasn’t caught on as well. I heard the “Anne of Green Gables”, a novel by a Canadian, was hugely popular in middle schools in Japan, so I bought the Canadian National Film Board production which has won many education awards and decided to build some video lessons around it.

I found some information on how to make video lessons in the EFL classroom and I succeeded with a few lessons. The students were already familiar with Anne of Green Gables, and the lesson was designed so students could answer comprehension questions about what they saw. After this success, my ambition increased but I never managed to develop another really good lesson. True, some lessons were very entertaining but I felt the students, and I, were using the video lesson as just another way to kill time. They were not learning English and I was just sitting there.

Some video lessons can be designed around the content. I had one lesson called “Classrooms in English Movies”. I found classroom scenes in movies, edited them onto one tape, made an introduction before each, and the students watched them with the Korean subtitles. Also, depending on the lesson theme of the textbook, I can make a video lesson. When the students were studying table manner differences between Korea and America, I found movies that showed American table manners. When students were studying how to buy something in a shop, I found a short scene in Anne of Green Gables, of a man buying a dress in a shop. These kind of complementary video lessons are well worth while. Some work always goes into preparing a video lesson, such as making handouts and doing transcribing, but the more work the more successful it will be.

I now used English captioned video all the time when teaching Korean teachers and they enjoy it as much as I do. The students can take to captioned English to, if the vocabulary is not too difficult. The content itself is often just as valid as the new English learning. I sometimes thought my video classes where one of the cultural high lights of the town , but that is just wishful thinking. Once I introduced myself to the students on the fist day by showing a tourist video of Canada to them on the TV in their classroom. I haven’t often used video on the classroom TV but it has potential. I know some teachers, when they are just totally out of teaching for that will just put on a video. This is sometimes done on the last day of school just for entertainment’s sake.