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Video Cassettes and the Internet Linda Thalman This file in Volterre-Fr started in June 1997 as a snapshot of Internet resources for using video in the EFL/ESL/ELT classroom and teaching with the Internet. It was published in an expanded article in the Tesol-France publication The Journal in the fall of 1997. This page was last updated in July 2001. An immense thank you to Richard Cooper, editor of the Video issue of The Journal (and co-author with Mike Lavery and Mario Rinvolucri of Video, Resource Books for Teachers, edited by Alain Maley, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-437102-6) for asking me to do an article for The Journal. The Tesol France Web site is at http://www.tesol-france.org/ Scrolling down further on this page you will find: Movies, Screenplays, Television, Literary resources, EFL/ESL Publisher Videos, Articles on the Internet, Email lists, Books for Teaching Languages Using the Internet and Thank You. Movies The Internet Movie Database http://us.imdb.org/ You'll find a searchable database, daily movie news, recent and upcoming movie releases, movie quotes, movie goofs, and more. This is a most extraordinary resource to use with movie videos. One example, typical of other entries: Silence of the Lambs (1991) http://us.imdb.com/Title?Silence+of+the+Lambs,+The+(1991) gives you a good synopsis of the film and an incredible number of internal links to follow for filmograhy and biography of the characters, movie quotes, movie goofs, complete details on production - more information than one needs almost. Use the Goofs Broswer resource to get your students talking. Show the appropriate clip, explain that there is a "goof" (mistake, error, faux pas, etc.) and have them speculate on what the "mistake" is. From the Movie Data Base site why not exploit the Movie Quote of the Day as a good warmup exercise in your class. http://us.imdb.com/quote_of_the_day Two of my favorites from the Dead Poet's Society 1989: Daulton answering phone: Welton Academy, hello. Yes he is, hold on. Mr. Nolan, it's for you. It's God. He says we should have girls at Welton. John Keating: Why do we need language? Neil Perry: To communicate... John Keating: Nooo!! To woo women! http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Actors_and_Actresses/ is a very long alphabetical list of actors and actresses with links to Web sites of just about everybody. The quality of the web sites vary as many are done by fans. Greatest Films of All Time http://www.filmsite.org/films.html Given the continual growth of the Web, it is likely that a search on a new film release will take you to a site that someone (a fan or movie company) has put up. Screenplays Two examples of places to find full scripts and transcripts are: Drew's Scripts-O-Rama http://www.script-o-rama.com/ with major feature film scripts and transcripts and television scripts. The list of American TV scripts were not very familiar to this writer not having lived in the US in a long time. If you do not have access to American television, TV scripts will be of less interest to you. http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/9371/script.htm Screenplays, scripts, transcripts, and drafts for dozens of films from Alien to The Graduate toYoung Frankenstein. Television and News CNN http://cnn.com/ and http://fyi.cnn.com/fyi/teachers.newsroom/ CNN Newsroom is one of my personal favorites because of its quality, variety and supporting classroom guides, which prior to the Web were (and still are) available by email. Now full transcripts are on the Web. I have personally transcribed dozens of CNN stories for classroom use - what a gift from CNN not to have to do this any more! CNN Newsroom Classroom Guides: Send an email to majordomo@tenet.edu in the body of your message type: subscribe cnn-newsroom NBC http://www.nbc.com/ NBC offers plenty of news and other stories, some with audio (I was using Real Audio Beta 4) and video clips which needed a "surround video" plug-in which I do not have installed). I personally found many pages unaesthetic: too many fonts and messy page organization. The server also seemed to set a cookie for every page I clicked on - annoying. TIME http://www.pathfinder.com/ Time Daily Stories is another source of texts to go with current news from television. The Time Magazine Web site has both the US and International Editions as well as archives. PBS http://www.pbs.org/ Has a wealth of information and for their NOVA programs there have a Teacher's Guide section with before and after viewing suggestions. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/nova/teachersguide/tglibrary.html has some 30 current and previous guides ranging from Shark Attack!, Warriors of the Amazon, Lightning! to "Kidnapped by UFO's?" Venus Unveiled and Vikings in America. Discovery Channel School http://school.discovery.com/ The programs are as varied as from Body Science to the Modern Presidency (a study of six postwar era presidents), Discover Magazine (a week of exploration into the unknown and the unseen), Communication: Baby Talk to Bytes and Cultures Alive! (learning about different countries and the people around the world). BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/ Site revisited in 1999: White background and black text. You can now use this site more easily! My original comments in 1997: With graphics turned off you will be unable to navigate this site. I was not amused! The whitish text on black depressed me even more. No further comment. Literary Resources to go with Films Literary resources abound on the Internet. A few starting points: Project Gutenberg, perhaps, the "original" online reading resource. http://www.promo.net/pg/ Case Study - Sense and Sensibility Let's say you choose Sense and Sensibility for class viewing. From the Project Guttenberg site you can find links to Jane Austin's Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. You can download the full text of Sense and Sensibility (676 Kb text or 279 Kb in a Zip file).. A simple search on Altavista found 400 matches - with the "usual" mix of excellent to totally unrelated sites. This raises the need for knowing how to do advanced searches and understanding of searching techniques, which this article does not cover. See Search Tips in Volterre-Fr. Using the Movie Data Base you can find more information than you'll know what to do with for Sense and Sensibility 1995 and the 1985 TV series. Commercial products, summary, goofs, quotes, locations, press articles, soundtracks, ratings, critics, laserdiscs, dates and more. The mind boggles… EFL/ESL Publisher Videos - produced for language learners Succinct print catalog-style descriptions of commercially available videos from EFL/ESL publishers (and accompanying course books, work books and audio cassettes) are relatively easy to find in Publishers' Web sites. Web sites with useful online pedagogical support does not seem to very prevalent, The Marzio School has produced "Real English" videos for the classroom which are unique because they are authentic materials and yet they are organized grammatically and functionally for beginners and low intermediates. Authenthentic video for this level is extremely rare. According to the reviewers, these videos are a lot of fun, even for the teachers. See: http://www.realenglish.tm.fr/ Articles on the Web about using Video cassettes Using Video in the Language Classroom http://www.englishclub.net/teachers/workshop/video.htm Page which covers briefly: Types of Video, Methods of Exploitation and Tips [Link added March 1999] Ed Tech Pages: Video http://skyscraper.fortunecity.com/networking/68/edtech/video.html Articles, reviews, papers and useful links dealing with the use of video in the EFL classroom, including: Meeting Objectives, The Business English Video Magazine, Family Album, USA, Headway, Video in Language Teaching, Video for Young Learners, Visitron/Working English. [Link added October 1998] Captioned Video: Making it Work for You by Randall S. Davis, Email: rsdavis@gol.com, from Nagoya City University, Japan http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Davis-CaptionedVideo/ An article worth reading with a sample lesson, handout, checklist, references and links. ESL/EFL Lessons Using Movies By Donna Hurst Tatsuki, Email: dtatsuki@gol.com Topics include: Checking into a Hotel in a Video-based Lesson, Politeness in Movies, Listening to Airplane Announcements in Movies, Narrating in Simple Past with Video, Jigsaw Reading Activity Using TV Listings and Quiz about the Movie "The Graduate" This is in the Internet TESL Journal, Vol. IV, No. 3, March 1998 http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Tatsuki-Movie/ Is the Movie the same as the Book? A Classroom Activity Comparing Novels and Movies, by Donna Hurst Tatsuki, Nishinomiya, Japan, Email: dtatsuki@gol.com http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Tatsuki-Movie.html Ideas on Using Videos http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Tatsuki-Video.html In The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. II, No. 2, February 1996 Donna Tatsuki, Nishinomiya, Japan Email: dtatsuki@gol.com This article includes ideas for using Agatha Christie films, the movie "Tanpopo" by Juzo Itami, Eyewitness VCR Newsreel Challenge by Parker Brothers, Hollywood newsreels or news broadcasts, and movie titles that provide a "taste" of fixed holidays like Christmas and moveable festivities like birthdays. Go to the Internet TESL Journal http://iteslj.org/ for the current issue Review of The Real English Video by Mark Ellison Taylor, EFLWEB at http://www.wfi.fr/volterre/video.html Past TESL-L postings on films, videos, and videotaping have been organized into six files in the TESL-L archive of reference files. You need to subscribe to TESL-L (which is free, see Email Lists for Teachers of English for subscribtion details) to access the archives. VIDEO ACTIVITY (656 lines) Suggestions on ways to use video to teach ESL/EFL. Ordering command: GET VIDEO ACTIVITY TESL-L F=MAIL VIDEO CONTENT (1017 lines) Using films in content courses or for thematic teaching. Included are many suggestions of what films to use and how to use them. Ordering command: GET VIDEO CONTENT TESL-L F=MAIL VIDEO LANG (250 lines) Videos and films for teaching about language, language learning, and ESL. Ordering command: GET VIDEO LANG TESL-L F=MAIL VIDEO SOURCES (133 lines) Sources for videos and books about film. Ordering command: GET VIDEO SOURCES TESL-L F=MAIL VIDEO TAPING (500 lines) Using a video camera for various class activities. Ordering command: GET VIDEO TAPING TESL-L F=MAIL VIDEO WORKPLAC (334 lines) Videotaping for teaching training, job interviews, and teacher evaluation. Ordering command: GET VIDEO WORKPLAC TESL-L F=MAIL VIDEO WKSHEETS (183 lines) Student worksheets for two videos, _Imagine_ (John Lennon) and _History, the Legend Continues_ (Michael Jackson). Ordering command: GET VIDEO WKSHEETS TESL-L F=MAIL MOVIE-SL The student discussion list for those interested in the cinema. More information on the student lists is available at: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/education/sl/sl.html [August 1997: Suggested by Tom Robb, thank you Tom!] Books for Teaching Languages Using the Internet http://www.wfi.fr/volterre/biblio.html This is a selected bibliography of books I've personally found useful and/or have been recommended by other teachers on the Net. Good reading! Thank You Thank you so much to the following net friends who wrote me while preparing this article: Larry Kelly, Ruth Makepeace, Ana (in Brazil), Terry Pruett-Said, Jeff Cady, Timothy Jacob Gluckman, Peter Neville, Joelle Uzarski, Gail-Shuster-Bouskila,… and others, including Dave Sperling and his book The Internet Guide.

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