Using video: Study Activities

These activities are focused more on the linguistic content of the video and help learners to understand and take linguistic elements from the audio to enrich their vocabulary and enhance their ability to understand spoken English.

Here are some activities you can use to help them study the text in more depth.

1. Using the controls on the video player, play your students a short sentence of one of the people speaking on the video. Ask the students to listen and count the number of words they hear spoken. You may need to play the segment two or three times to help students count the words. This is a good activity to help students understand spoken English and hear how words are often joined together and where the word boundaries are.

2. Using a small segment of the video (30 seconds to 1 minute at the most) ask students to listen and write down every word they hear (as a dictation). You will need to let them listen at least two or three times and give them time to compare their texts and help each other between listenings. If your students have access to computers you could get them to work alone to do this as they will then be able to work at their own speed.

3. You can use segments of the video transcripts and create ‘gap-fill’ activities by blanking out some of the keywords, then get students to listen and try to hear what the missing word was. Don’t blank out more than 10 words though.

4. You can cut up the transcripts into about ten segments. Jumble them up and then see if your learners can put them back into the correct order. They can then watch the clip again and check the order of the text.

5. You can ask students to watch segments of the video and use the text to act out their own version of the clip.

Procedure 

Procedure for setting the activities

1. Where possible try to give the students control of the video clips so that they can play and listen again at their own speed. Make sure they know how to operate the media player though and that they know they can stop and pause it and listen to segments more times.

Procedure for using the activities

1. If your students have already watched the video clips a few times then it might be better to use these activities as revision in a following lesson.