Teaching a foreign language, it is important to give students a visual representation of the life, traditions, and linguistic realities of English-speaking countries

Ideal Types of Videos for ESL Instruction

• Video-based material can range from a still picture taken from a video to the whole movie or TV show and everything in-between. Which one you choose depends on the aim of the lesson at hand.
• 1. Documentaries
• 2. TV shows, films and trailers
• 3. Cartoons
• 4. Homemade videos (including the students’ own home videos)
• 5. Advertisement
• 6. News clips and stories
• 7. Weather forecasts
• 8. Instructional videos (focusing on English language acquisition or other content areas)
• 9. Vlogs and video clips from websites
• 10. Sports events

Organizing video lessons in teaching process

• Video lessons can be a great tool to engage learners and give them an opportunity to develop language skills through visual and audio stimuli. By choosing the right video material and by offering well-planned video lessons to students (students work with the video material for the whole lesson), we will be giving them an alternative (and often more entertaining) way to experience language outside of grammar explanations and textbook exercises. 

• Step 1 – Choose a relevant video 
• It’s difficult not to choose videos being tempted by videos with great special effects or your favorite actor, but teachers need to choose videos which teach language necessary to students and according to the syllabus. While picking up a video one must pay attention to its length (usually from 3-6 minutes), style (with a monologue, a talk between two or three people), and the challenge level (the video must be challenging for students but within their level). 
• Step 2 – Activate students’ background schema and organize vocabulary work
• As any ordinary lesson, video lessons also need a well-thought lead-in to prepare the learners.  When doing listening and readings with your students, it is important to take time at the very beginning of the lesson to activate your students’ experiences with and knowledge of the topic of the listening. Different strategies (using visuals, real or everyday objects, discussion, readings etc.) can be used to help students relate new information appearing in the recordings to their existing knowledge.  

• Step 3 – Provide students with context clues
• Context clues are the best example of a good pre-listening activity for video lessons. For example, you tell your students ‘’In this video Jack and Alice meet at a conference and negotiate a deal”. That may not be an example of an effective lead-in into the context since you give the main information by yourself rather than trying to generate it from the students. Instead, you could ask them the following questions:
• Where do you think this conference is? Europe? Asia? The USA? (screenshot of any visual sign which may help them to get the place)
• What professions do Jack and Alice have? (their photos which focus on their clothes. Clothes tell a lot about people’s profession)
• How is their negotiation going to be ended? (characters’ facial expressions) 
• Step 4 – While watching activities
• Before using the video in the classroom, you watch it a couple of times to notice where actors pause, when they have a reaction to something or in which cases the conversions seem to shift. If you choose the right places to pause, you will give the learners the opportunity to use critical thinking to guess the scenes. 

• Step 5 – After-watching activities 
• After watching the video, students are given a list of questions/statements to discuss. Surely, the statements/questions must be video related. The aim of the activity is to personalize the material which has been learnt. Suppose, they are watching a video where a woman discusses the challenges of modern life for a working woman. The post-viewing discussion statements/questions may be:
• How do women in your country handle their work-life balance? 
• What advice will you give them to have a more balanced daily routine?
• Use video materials to incorporate into the lessons when you feel that the students are sick and tired of the monotonous learning procedure.