Who Benefits From YouTube in the EL Classroom?

• students with limited opportunities for interaction with native English speakers
• students in courses that focus on conversation, listening/speaking, fluency, English through film, English through music, business English, oral presentation skills, or American culture
• high school, university, or adult English language learners (ELLs)
• upper-level beginners to advanced-level ELLs
  

How Do You Comb Through the Sea of YouTube Videos to Find Anything Useful?

Step 1. Select a topic—be specific rather than general. Let’s say you’re teaching a conversation course, and your students are interested in preparing for job interviews.

Step 2. On YouTube, enter a search for “job interview questions and answers.”

Step 3. Before you try to preview anything, immediately screen out options that are longer than 3 or 4 minutes. Compact length helps ensure that students won’t be overwhelmed by content that is too long or verbose. They will also be more likely to listen all the way through a second or third time if necessary.

Step 4. Screen for videos in which the still image has a professional look; generally, sound quality is likely to be better if the visual quality is also high.

Step 5. Start screening by listening to the first 10 seconds of videos whose titles match the content you’re looking for. If the video has the following features, then you’ve probably got a winner:

• authentic speech (as opposed to slowed-down conversations that you often hear in your ESL/EFL listening curriculum)
• native speakers of English
• the type of accent (e.g., American, British)
  

Step 6. As you listen all the way through the video, jot down some comprehension questions for your students to discuss after they view it. Then compose two or three questions to prime your students before they watch it.

Step 7. Decide when and how to present the listening assignment:

• You could copy and paste the video’s URL along with your before and after questions in an email to your students or set it up in a course management system module to be watched for homework.
• In some countries, Facebook is more frequented by students than email, so you may choose to create a closed Facebook group for your class.
• If you have lots of time to prepare, you could post all links and questions in an online syllabus before the term begins.
  

Classroom Practice and Expansion

However you choose to connect your students with your YouTube listening lessons, two things are key. First, make sure everyone has had a chance to watch the video on his or her own. If not, showing it once again in class would be worth everyone’s time (remember, the video should be under 4 minutes so you wouldn’t be eating into a lot of class time). Second, debrief the discussion questions together. You can have them respond to the questions in pairs, in small groups, or as a whole class. You could even provide a video transcript for further analysis focusing on deeper listening comprehension, pronunciation study/imitation, vocabulary expansion, and so on. Students may also come up with their own questions to continue the discussion in a vein that is of particular interest to them.

After talking through the content of the video with others, I also like to have students summarize what they found most interesting in a 45- to 60-second video or audio recording for homework. This allows them to utilize the whole gamut of listening/speaking skills and incorporate ideas and vocabulary that we address in class.

Finally, smartphones enable students to take this type of lesson on the go. The more you can get them to listen to English, the better they’ll be able to listen, comprehend, and respond.

Rachel Stokes is currently an instructor at ESL services at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to this position, she was director of the English Studies Department at the Consortium for Global Education, in Amman, Jordan. She has also taught in Canada, Japan, and Atlanta, Georgia.