I’ve been using video quite a bit recently with my classes, in particular with a group of pre-intermediate students and a focus on Business English. I have to say, I don’t have a great deal (if any) experience of the business world, so I like to keep these lessons as skills-focused and based on my students’ experiences and/or ambitions as much as possible. As such I’ve recently been using video in my classes as stimuli for discussion and also as a basis for transcription activities. Something funny happened this week that I’d like to share with you.
For the past two weeks I have been using plans created by Jamie Keddie that he has made available on his TEFLclips website – in particular two plans that involved transcription. They are, in order of appearing in my lessons, How To Answer a Sales Call (feat. Jerry Seinfeld) and Elevator Pitch. You can find the plans here and here.
Both plans require the students to listen to a short video and transcribe the audio. Being quite quick and in American English this made it quite difficult (these students don’t have any American English speakers among their teachers). While they were watching Seinfeld, I was in control of the playback of the video, and although they did transcribe quite well, they did find it difficult.
It was during the lesson on Elevator Pitches that the students discovered something quite cool; something I’m going to share…
First of all, the component elements of the lesson: the Elevator Pitch video clip; a classroom computer and overhead projector; VideoLAN VLC Media Player; a student in charge of video playback.
*** NOTE – in order to do this, you will need to download the video clip from YouTube (using a website like www.savevid.com/. Please bear in mind that if you do this, you will be breaking YouTube’s Terms of Service.
This is the basic interface of VLC Media Player:
Click on the Playback menu at the top of the player and you are presented with a number of options for speeding up or slowing down the clip:
This is what happens if you click on Slower:
the playback becomes 0.67 or 67% of normal speed. (In my research, that seemed a little too slow and gave the video a comedy voice).
This is what happens if you click Slower (fine):
the playback is slowed down by 0.10 or 10% of the normal speed. Hence you could play it at 90% or 80% (if you click Slower (fine) twice). The audio should be slower and easier for your students to transcribe.
Of course, you could also speed up the video for your students, though that could be seen as a little sadistic! Anyway, I invite you to experiment and find ways to use this trick with your students.
(Also, as you have probably guessed, my students found the comedy voice and slowed down audio hilarious for a significant portion of the lesson, as did I!)
NB – VLC Media Player is available to download for free from VideoLAN; it’s major advantage as a media player is that you can download it on to a USB memory stick, thus giving you the ability to play audio and video even if the computer does not have its own media player! It’s also useful if you are running a PC and cannot play mp4 video files on Windows Media Player.
This is a great tip Mike. Thanks to your students for discovering it
It’s actually a very useful tool for any learner of English that would like to slow down a YouTube clip
Will be linking to this page soon from a list of video technocompetences that I am creating
Jamie =)
Thanks for the comment, Jamie. I’ll let my students know that they have discovered a really useful tip, and show them VLC for their own interest/language learning next time I see them. As you can imagine, they found it really funny when they discovered the slo-mo in the lesson. Actually, I did too! I also thought ‘How clever!’. It’s a really useful tool and tip for using video in language learning. I’m definitely going to bear it in mind for future video activities I plan.
Thanks very much for your future linking from your video technocompetences!
Mike
That’s great! i’ll use it for videos in Spanish
As a project, maybe you could videotape your students giving pitches 
Hi Ms. La Flecha
Thanks very much for the comment, and mention on your blog. I’d be really interested to know how you’re using video. I’m planning to video the students next week (if they’re ok with it , of course) =)
Mike
[...] Understanding Video in Classroom Made Easier… February 21, 2010 Ms. Flecha Leave a comment Go to comments Some of you may already be familiar with using video in your lessons. I usually incorporate it through online read alouds like this one, that incorporate closed caption text so kids can follow along that way if they want to. But, what if you want you’re hesitant (like me) about using videos because you’re worried your Beginner/Intermediate ELLs may have trouble following along? Well, Mike Harrison, an ESL teacher in London, writes about a great find that his students discovered to help make videos easier to understand…Read about it at: Techno Tool Tames Transcription Trouble. [...]
I feel like an idiot now – I’ve been using VLC for ages and knew of the speed facility and still never thought how it could be used in the classroom. This is a great idea – thanks!
Hi Sputnik, thanks for your comment.
I was just totally surprised when it happened in the lesson, that I couldn’t help but join in the students laughter – they found it quite funny! I’d been using VLC for a couple of months, but hadn’t thought to explore it really, just using it as a replacement for Windows.
It’s a really good feature I think. I’ve just looked on Quicktime and it has a facility for doing this too, but it can’t be adjusted so finely (1/2 normal speed, normal speed, twice and three times normal speed). VLC lets you adjust the speed to a greater degree, so the clip won’t sound silly when you play it back. I’m certainly going to use it a lot more for any video-based lessons I plan.
Mike
Well, that settles it. I’m a-gonna have to get me one of them VLCs.
That’s going to just open up a whole new world of goodness. Thanks, Mike!
[...] Mike Harrison: Techno Tool Tames Transcription Trouble [...]
[...] Techno Tool Tames Transcription Trouble – a watershed post for me, since it was the first time I blogged about something my students had taught me! They found a nifty trick related to playing video on the computer. Needless to say, it was great to share the tip with others here, and I made sure my students knew they had helped other teachers around the world! This post was also submitted for Anne Hodgson’s post on the Business English blog carnival. Anne made a neat quiz about the posts, to see if you have really read them – it’s cool; check it out! [...]