Prison Break And YouTube In Class

If you’re on the lookout for fun an educational ways to incorporate video into class, you’ve found the right post:

EFL Geek recently created and carried out a lesson using the pilot episode of Prison Break focusing on how to best use subtitles for language acquisition. His students are quite advanced, as is his own technical ability; he used both of these advantages to the benefit of the class, dividing the first 20 minutes of the film into four sections, with different combinations of subtitles. He also created good quality student handouts and incorporated some interesting personalized questions for discussion (Would continue to date someone in prison? Would you get a tattoo – big or small?). And of course there are discussion questions which require students to reflect on the experience of watching the sections with different subtitles (Korean/English/none). You can download his lesson plan as well as the student handout from this post.

Sue at ELT Notebook has also posted lesson plans for You Tube videos: two touristic promotional videos, one from Australia and one from the UK.

She points out the reasons to seek out promotional videos (they tend to be professionally produced and therefore of higher than average video quality; also, because as promotional materials there are no copyright issues), gives a couple example activities such as identifying “emotional impact” words, and shares tips for adapting it for higher and lower level learners. Also suggested is a follow-up activity getting students to come up with content for a promotional video for their hometown. The activities are basically ready to go, and I especially like the idea of seeking out promotional videos is a great tip, given the various quality of video you can find on YouTube.

I don’t consider myself a huge documentary fan – but I sure don’t mind social issues (plus I just saw a good one – if you want to guess: it is not a documentary as a film but was a non-fiction book and is definitely connected to social issues), so stay tuned for my thoughts on using documentaries in class.