Teaching English with Video - Report Example

Critical ESL Task Customer Inserts His/Her Name Customer Inserts Grade Course Customer Inserts Tutor’s Name Insert Date Here (Day, Month, Year) Introduction Teaching English to non-English students implies an oral and aural way has gained considerable momentum in these days of globalization and conceptualization. Maximum of the students are Chinese and have little or no knowledge about the English language. These last few days, educators have spent maximum time in speaking and listening to the English. In the following context, the use of video format text as a method and strategy will be used for teaching English. While teaching the subject, the technique used is the movies. This procedure will involve making students watch about the social and cultural issues listening to the language. While watching and listening, they will able to better understand and decipher the meaning and complete message. Teaching is a very dynamic process and while in developing any program, a teacher should select certain aspects of content knowledge and language. The challenge in front of the teacher is not just to replicate the contents of the course framework but also to enable the students to have a complete understanding of the content and to deliver the support for them to have complete access to the culture and linguistic process. Films are targeted in many ways through discussions in increasing the motivation of EFL/ESL students; films often increase the motivation level of EFL/ESL students like making learners familiar with the culture and making classes more interesting. Teachers often are making use of many different ways to use the film in the classroom. Films are encouraged to set up a content based course encouraging learners in the process of critical thinking and discussion skills and enabling them to have a complete background about the society or culture of another country or countries. Here the class consists of 20 students aged between 13-15 years from non-English speaking background, their countries of origin being Taiwan and China. Course Objective About the Course Through language unknown the students are having the knowledge about the social and cultural issues. The aim of the course is enabling students to have the knowledge of language. The course I will follow is teaching the language through the film that would increase their motivation, permit them to comprehend the material with ease and make use of the linguistic form. Students are motivated by the use of the issues being raised in the film, which are more connected to their culture, life and society. Side by side students are made to consider the task enabling them to have deep consideration of the issues from various angles as students are asked to explain the various issues being raised in the film. Course Strategy The course strategy lies on the main aspect of Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999), who illustrated the main factor that how the way critical literacy should be implemented in the classroom session by: 1. establishing a common knowledge base, 2. focusing on language, and 3. engaging critically with texts. These three processes can be achieved; I have formulated the course of video enabling students to comprehend the ideas from the oral input as well as increase their imaginative powers through the process of previewing, while-viewing and postviewing. (Allan, 1984) This course will be of the six weeks duration, whereby I involve the children in movie watching. This process I undertake thrice a week, showing one movie per week. In the whole process of movie watching while making them analyze the movie scenes, I will focus on the improvement of their language implying two macro level tasks at these places: One is making them listening the scenes and then writing them in their own words and the second is creating work sheet and making them write the answers of the questions laying particular emphasis on language part. Previewing In the previewing process, I took the practice of language decoding. This kind of teaching enables learners to get into the hook of learning that is related to the knowledge they already have in possession. In this stage, I tell the students to make themselves aware of the theme of the movie and teach them vocabulary of the words within the movie. Within the context of this framework, the theme is described while distributing worksheets for them to complete the task. While-viewing Soon after the previewing stage, I will involve them in the primary activity. Soon after viewing it, I will tell the students to comprehend the part of movie they considered best by answering the questions only in English, and make them involve in repeating the dialogues they mostly liked. It might happen that while viewing the scene, students may find difficulty to recognize the words spoken by characters but after repetition of the particular scene, again students will be asked to repeat the dialogues. With this exercise, students will be able to understand the meaning of the sentences uttered in the English language. Postviewing I make the students turn by turn to stand up and narrate at least one half of the movie in simple English. Then I will record what they have spoken and later make them listen to it and then make them write few sentences what they have spoken from the record and I then will make corrections of the same. In this way their language will also get improved. To increase their imaginative power, I will ask the students to answer the questions verbally and the same in writing too. I will also give the students tape recorder for home for them to listen so that in the next session again, I will ask them to narrate what they have heard. Hereby two macro tasks I will apply, I will tell them to read the topic, read the transcript and tell them to find the verbs, tenses and phrases and secondly I will involve them in the oral and written repetition of the phrases. After the movie is seen, students are made to contrast the culture with their own culture. To ease the students attempt to contrast the culture, I will construct a table that can help them in finding out the differences. Several scenes in the movie will be shown in the table with several aspects of their culture. I will make the students to find out the culture shown in the scenes, write them down in their own words and then compare them with their own culture. In this way, students’ knowledge of the understanding of the culture is known and by writing in their own words in English, they will learn the aspects of literature as well as grammar as I will be pointing out the mistakes simultaneously. This is a second Macro task by making them write down in their own words. In whole process I will be looking at their grammatical part, as they would be making corrections of the same. Soon after three weeks only I could see lot of improvement among students who were quick to learn and able to narrate the dialogues in the movie now with at ease and without any grammatical mistake. After six weeks I could see seventy per cent improvement among them, as now they were able to understand English and also speaking the same but still required little more practice in writing, though they were able to write but with little grammatical mistakes. Theoretical aspects to teaching and learning The teaching here I have prescribed is based on the two theoretical aspects: Cognitive process as well as process of Imaginative learning. Listening involves process of deciphering and constructing meaning from the both verbal as well as non-verbal messages. Therefore as it is assumed, listening process cannot be described as passive because listening only as I have followed imply many of the complicated processes. Hereby there is also process of interaction between the two processes of subsuming cognitive process: One is the bottom up and secondly is the top-down. In the bottom up process “the meaning is constructed from the smallest unit of the spoken language to the largest one in a linear mode,” (Kusumarasdyati, 2004) therefore learners tries to comprehend the spoken words through the process of spoken discourse by following the method of decoding sounds to form words. Hereby the words are connected to form phrases, which form the sentences. These sentences form a complete text, the meaning of which is formed by the listeners. Besides, in this process also involved the use of the stress, intonations or rhythm. This process can be used to make the learners learn the processing preferably making them necessary to distinguish two sounds and rising or falling intonations. The top-down processing, involves the interpretations of the meaning as referred by the speakers with the help of the schemata or structures of knowledge. In this system, the importance of the learner’s background knowledge is also emphasized. During the aural perception, the learners prior knowledge facilitate them to grasp the incoming information by relating his or her previous knowledge with the recent knowledge, and if they don’t have such knowledge, it would be difficult for them to comprehend a specific dialogue or a spoken word. It is said that to get better results, “cognitive aspects of such learning ought to be merged with affective aspects, and this is where imagination can perform its function in joining the thinking-feeling dyad”. (Spencer, 2003) Imaginative Learning According to the Johnson and Giorgis (2003), the process of imagination involves ability to formulate events, images, characters or any situations. Learning does not involve merely acquiring of ideas, facts or concepts but also enables to make learners have an experience of personal feelings so that they can easily understand the meaning. This process of imagination enables the learners to attain the knowledge from diverse perspectives. Conclusion Both the cognitive as well as the imaginative theories are applicable in video based teaching methods. Movies are considered as the most effective medium to help teachers to form the EFL learners listening skills and increase their imaginative powers. Through the movies, learners are greatly motivated and their potentiality to learn through the aural perception too increases. After this, I personally found that students are taking deep interest in the movies selected and they are showing great improvement in the language while reading, writing as well as speaking. As movies are liked by many and have shown many pedagogical merits, therefore movies are best medium to make the non- English learners have better language skills. Reference List Allan, M. (1985). Teaching English with Video. Essex: Longman Hadley, A. (2001). Teaching language in context (3rd edn). Boston, USA: Thomson Heinle. Hammond, J., & Macken-Horarik, M. (1999). Critical literacy challenges and questions for ESL classrooms. TEOSL Quarterly, 33(3), 528-544. Iannone, R. (2001). Imagination: The Missing Link in Curriculum and Teaching. Education, 122(2), 307-309. Kusumarasdyati. (2004). Listening, Viewing and Imagination: Movies in EFL Classes. Retrieved on May 25, 2009 from W.W.W: http://www.ierg.net/confs/2004/Proceedings/Kusumarasdyati.pdf Johnson, N. J., & Giorgis, C. (2003). Imagination. The Reading Teacher, 56(5), 504-505 Sampson, R.J. (2009). Utilizing Film to Enhance Student Discussion of Sociocultural Issues. Retrieved on May 25, 2009 from W.W.W: http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Sampson-Film.html Sommer, P. (2001). Using Film in the English Classroom: Why and How. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44(5), 485-487 Spencer, M. M. (2003). What More Needs Saying about Imagination? The Reading Teacher, 57(1), 105-111 Van Duzer, C. (1997). Improving ESL Learners' Listening Skills: At the Workplace and Beyond. Washington D.C.: National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education. Read More