You might want to see our book excerpt, Eight Ways to Use Video With English Language Learners
I’ve written a guest post for Edutopia titled 5-Minute Film Festival: 8 Videos for ELL Classrooms.
Check Out my related New York Times post
The Best Fun Videos For English Language Learners In 2015 – So Far
Movies and television shows can be an effective tool for teaching and learning English (or, for that matter, any academic subject) if used strategically and not as a “babysitting” device.
I thought it might be useful to prepare a “The Best…” list resources that teachers might find useful related to using video in the ESL/EFL classroom. I’ve appreciated the suggestions that readers have offered and, even if they didn’t make my list, I’ve the titles that they have recommended near the end of post.
Before I list specific movies or shows, I’ll begin by some ideas, and sites, where you can get more recommendations on how to use video in the classroom.
I’ve hardly ever shown a video clip for more than ten minutes during one class period. There are many ways to use them, but I’ve primarily done so in two ways. One is just to show a clip connected to the theme we might be studying at the time, and then have students write what happened chronologically.
The other is a technique called “Back To The Screen” that I adapted from Zero Prep: Ready To Go Activities For The Language Classroom by Laurel Pollard and Natalie Hess. I pick a clip from a movie (the highway chase scene from one of the Matrix movies, for example. I then divide the class into pairs with one group facing the TV and the other with their back to it. Then, after turning off the sound, I begin playing the movie. The person who can see the screen tells the other person what is happening. Then, after awhile, I switch the groups around. Afterwards, the pairs need to write a chronological sequence of what happened, which we in class. Finally, everyone watches the clip, with sound, together. Students really enjoy activity.
Two excellent sites that offer countless other ideas about how to use videos in teaching and learning English are Ressources pour le College and The English Learner Movie Guide. The resources they offer are just too numerous to list here. In addition to teaching activities, you can get suggestions for which movies might work best for specific purposes.
You might also be interested in The Best Movie Scenes To Use For English-Language Development.
Now I’ll list what I believe to be The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL (by the way, links usually are connected to Amazon). I’m doing ranking a bit differently from my past lists. All the ones I list I think are comparable in terms of usefulness in the classroom. However, there are two that I think are stand-outs. I’ll save them for the end.
Here are my picks:
I like Brum , a little talking car that has all sorts of adventures. Younger and older students find it entertaining.
Animated Tales Of The World from HBO is an excellent series of folktales from throughout the world. I’ve used them to teach geography, history, and writing.
The Pink Panther series of movies have been great, specifically the parts where Peter Sellers fights his man-servant Cato. These hilarious slapstick scenes are wonderful times to teach vocabulary related to home. However, I offer recommendation with some hesitancy, since some could view it as perpetuating stereotypes and find it offensive. I’d be interested in hearing opinions on issue. Certainly, none of my students, who are mostly Asian, have felt that way. I’ve engaged students in kind of discussion everytime I’ve shown the movies.
Father Of The Bride with Steve Martin (and its sequel) provides some hilarious and teachable scenes about family, food, and home.
David Deubelbeiss, from EFL Classroom 2.0, and I agree that the movie Bigis a great one. In fact, David is going to upload a bunch of classroom activities related to the movie on his site.
The Bear provides a lot of opportunities to discuss serious topics. It doesn’t have a whole lot of dialogue, so it’s very accessible to Beginning English Language Learners.
Globe Trekker has a ton of excellent travel videos. I’ve used them in all of my English, Geography, and History classes, and they’re very accessible.
I’m ranking two collections of TV shows as the Top Two videos for teaching and learning ESL/EFL.
Number two is America’s Funniest Home Videos. It has so many editions — family, pets, sports, animals — that you can find something to teach just about anything. They’re already divided into short clips. My only caveat, though, is that a few of them seem cruel and/or disgusting to me. So I screen them before I use a clip in class.
My absolute favorite show to use is Mr. Bean — The Whole Bean. Mr. Bean is very accessible to even Beginning English Language Learners, and he is involved in so many situations that you can find a clip that will support whatever unit you’re teaching. And he’s so funny!
Readers made a number of other suggestions. I didn’t include some of them in my list just because I haven’t seen the shows.
Sebastian recommends Seinfield and Joey, specifically the episode called Joey and the ESL. I definitely want to see that — how often is an ESL class shown in a TV situation comedy?
EFL Geek recommends several movies, including An Inconvenient Truth, Almost Famous, and Stand By Me. For TV, he likes Lost, Corner Gas, Prison Break and Smallville. I did a quick and informal poll of my students, and they agreed that Smallville helped them with their English a lot.
I regularly use Connect With English, a video series that’s designed to help students learn English and be engaging. It seems to be one of the better ones of its type out there. Though the free interactive exercises are great, too. I thought readers might be interested in one page worksheet that we sometimes use, instead. Students have to make predictions based on the title of the episode, explain if their predictions were correct, write several questions about the episode that they ask a partner afterwards (who then writes the answers). It’s good listening, speaking, and writing practice. Online exercises for the show are here.
The Internet History Sourcebook Project is an extraordinary collection of history resources. I’m particularly impressed with their Modern History in the Movies, Ancient History in the Movies, and Medieval Movies. In those three collections, movies are categorized by era and described. It’s a gold mine for any Social Studies teacher, and especially for those of us who teach English Language Learners. I use very short clips of movies, following by a writing/thinking prompt, all the time.
American History Film Resources also offers a good listing of film resources for different periods of American history.
Movieclips has thousands of short video clips from movies and they’re not blocked by our content filter! And they’re available without registering — except for clips that have “mature” content.
David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has given us all a gift by compiling his Top 100 Youtube videos for EFL. You might find The Best Ways To Access Educational YouTube Videos At School helpfu....
Using film and moving image to enrich ESOL teaching and learning is a very nice listing of different ways to use film with English Language Learners. It was written by Cormac Conway and Michaela Salmon.
David Deubelbeiss some nice resources and ideas in his post, Using Silent Video in the EFL Classroom.
I’ve always asked students to watch English movies or television programs as part of their weekly homework, but David Deubelbeiss writes much more thoughtfully about the idea in post on what he calls Extensive Watching.
WingClips has organized a huge number of short clips from movies thematically — perseverance, responsibility — and then lets you show them from the site or embed them elsewhere. Important caveats to keep in mind before checking it out are that it clearly comes from a religious, and Christian, perspective, so a number of the themes — adultery, for example, you probably just want to skip. In addition, it appears to have an exceptionally large number of war-related movie clips (“Machine Gun Preacher”?), but that might be a false impression. As in any website, you just have to pick and choose what’s useful.
Inspire My Kids has short video clips and descriptions of people that are designed to inspire students.
Check out Twitter Chat summary from #ELTchat on using movies and videos in an...
A Neat Way To Use A Video In Class
Very Helpful Research On Using Photos & Videos In Lessons
I learned about the Miniscule video series from the great site, The Kid Should See . Here is how they described it:
A French-made collection of short stories, Minuscule is about the private lives of ants, snails, bees, caterpillars, wasps, spiders and other tiny creatures, all told without any speaking at all.
In some ways, they’re like an animated Mr. Bean short — perfect for ELL’s. They’re engaging, brief, and provide plenty of opportunities for students to describe what they saw in writing and orally. You can find a bunch of them on YouTube.
Of course, English Central may be the very best place on the Web for videos and ELL’s.
In video, Dan Meyer demonstrates how the movie search engine Subzin could be very useful for teachers. I would strongly recommend you read his short, but elegant, postdescribing how he used it to create video. Subzin is a search engine for quotes in movies and series. For example, here’s a page of results after I searched “asking questions” and I see some good candidates for The Best Videos Showing The Importance Of Asking Good Questions list. ESL/ELL teachers could find very handy when they’re looking for clips to support thematic units like food, or specific grammar functions.
