How to use videos to develop students’ listening competency

Ph Vivian

April 2018

While teaching language skills through “mechanical exercises and traditional fill-in-the-blank, true/false, and multiple-choice assessment” (Yassaei, 2012) does not arouse students’ interest, videos turn out to be a valuable “audio-visual aids to enhance the learning of foreign languages” (Canning-Wilson, 2000). However, it is how to use videos in English language classrooms would deserve being taken into consideration.

Harmer (2007, 301) proposes a number of useful techniques in employing videos in English classrooms, especially in listening comprehension. Those techniques are silent viewing (the video is played without the sound), free framing (teacher pauses the video in the middle and ask students guess what is going to happen next), partial viewing (a large part of the screen is covered so that students need to discuss and guess what the video is about), picture or speech (a group of the class watch the video while the other group do not), subtitled films (the subtitle presented on the screen to help students see and hear English at the same time), and picture-less listening (students are asked to listen to the sound before watching the video).

In my personal education settings, I have applied subtitled films techniques whenever I have chances to show my students a video. Interestingly, I have witnessed how seriously my students watch a video with English subtitles on the screen. The positive effects of this technique are also mentioned in Winke, Gass, and Sydorenko (2010). They assert that watching videos with English subtitles enhances students’ attention, reduces their anxiety, facilitates understanding by confirming information, and above all, maximizes students’ motivation in practice listening skills.

REFERENCES

[1]    Canning-Wilson, C. (2000). Practical aspects of using video in the foreign language classroom. The Internet TESL Journal, VI(11). Retrieved on April 20, 2018 from http://iteslj.org/Articles/CanningVideo.html.

[2]    Harmer, J. 2007. The practice of English language teaching. 4th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson. Longman.

[3]    Yassaei, S. (2012). Using Original Video and Sound Effects to Teach English. English Teaching Forum, 1. 12-16.

[4]    Winke, P., Gass, S., & Sydorenko, T. (2010). The effects of captioning videos used for foreign language listening activities. Language Learning & Technology, 14(1), 65-86.