Thursday, June 04, 2015

Using Youtube Videos for Listening

(TESOL ideas)

Google Drive Folder HERE

Index
* 8 Childhood Lessons You Should Unlearn
A Farewell to Handwriting?
* Bourdain eats fetal duck egg on air 
* Crash Course World History for IELTS Listening
* Education Is a System of Indoctrination of the Young - Noam Chomsky
English Language Learning Tips - Collocations
* Floating Away
* Friends International Cambodia
* How to Develop Healthy Eating Habits
* How to Give and Receive Gifts
* How to Say No Politely Good Manners 
* How to Write a Letter
* Living on the Moon
* Mad TV--Low Cost Airlines
* My Gap Year Experience
* Party in the Paris Catacombs, But Don't Tell
Samantha Nutt on the Problems of Volunteer Tourism | NowThis
* Table Etiquette Scenarios, Manners & Mistakes: Lifestyles & Social Skills
* Top7 Places to Visit Dubai Travel 


A few weeks ago, I was teaching a lesson about home swapping out of an intermediate textbook.  And I was worried that the textbook didn't explain the concept well enough, and that my students were going to be confused.  So I did a quick search on the Internet to see if I could find anything on home swapping.

I got lucky because I found a perfect Youtube video.   (This video here). It was short, sweet, and explained the concept of home swapping brilliantly, and it even had interesting visuals.  And I was really happy with the way it gave my students authentic real-world input.

In fact, I was so pleased with that Youtube introduction, that I became addicted to trying to find Youtube videos for all my lessons.  When the textbook had a lesson on budget airlines, I found a Youtube video on the same subject (this video here.)  And when the textbook had a lesson on Dubai, I found a great Youtube video on Dubai (here).  For a lesson on eating etiquette, I found another Youtube video (here).  And for the lesson on balut, I used this video here.

For all of these videos, I tried to follow the CELTA style listening lesson of first doing some pre-listening task, then doing a gist listening, then a listening for detail.  (Some of the listening tasks are perhaps better than others, but at least that was what I was trying to do.)

I've also taken the trouble to transcribe all of these videos.  Which was a bit of extra work on my part, but I'm a big fan of always giving the students a transcript at the end of the listening, and I thought my students would get much more benefit from these videos if they could actually read the transcript as they listened to it, so the final listening is with the transcript.

I've decided to post these Youtube listening lessons here on this blog.
My general rule is to only post activities on this blog that can stand independently of whatever particular textbook they were designed to supplement. These Youtube listenings are admittedly border-line in that regard, because they were all chosen to lead-in to a specific lesson from a specific textbook.
But, I think they can still stand independently as well, if someone is looking to do a quick listening lesson using authentic material.  (Or in some cases not so quick-- a couple of these ended up taking about 20 minutes.)
As any teacher knows, the key to surviving is to keep expanding your collection of material, so that you have plenty of stuff you can quickly go to in an emergency.  I thought for my own benefit at least it would be nice to index these short listening lessons on the blog so I can easily find them again if I ever need a quick listening lesson all ready and waiting.

In the next few days, I'll be posting the Youtube listening materials I've got so far.  I'll also be going back and indexing them at the front of this post.  Then I'll post new material as I create it.

Playlist HERE

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