YouTube and Listening Activities

Recently in my CALL class, we discussed how to use YouTube videos to teach langauge learners.  In my research, I discovered an article by Zamira Alimemaj, a lecturer at the University of Vlora in Albania. In her article, "YouTube Language Learning and Teaching Techniques", she gives an example of how to use a movie clip to teach language (May 2010, p.12). Some suggestions Alimemaj presents are to have students watch a scene without sound and then predict the main idea. Then have your students watch it with sound only and transcribe it. Finally she suggests having them watch the video with sound and picture. She also suggests selecting challenging vocabulary to teach and formulating opinion questions to ask the students. All these ideas are excellent methods I can use.  

Another valuable resource I have discovered to use for listening activities is called Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab.  This site is an amazing source for helping English Language Learners improve their listening skills.  There are a lot of audio recordings on various topics posted.  The site gives you pre-listening, listening, and post-listening activities. These recordings will challenge each learner at their own level as they are arranged by level of difficult.

Also, there are a few videos that can be used with the  pre-listening, listening, and post-listening activities.  Here is an example of the different listening exercises for the topic of Breakfast Recipes.