Friday 22 August 2008

Transcribed Videos for EFL ESL

EFL / ESL students really enjoy watching video clips but often find authentic materials difficult to cope with due to the variety of accents and the speed with which native speakers communicate.

Yappr offers a good solution to this problem with a huge collection of transcribed video clips. As students watch the clip, they see the script appearing in a window alongside.

The videos are separated by level; easy - medium - hard and are also categorised by theme, such as sport, cartoons, nature etc. There is a 'sexy' category too, but this is mainly made up of music videos and commercials and I don't think there is anything particularly 'adult' about it.

You can watch all the movie clips without registering, but if you do register there is a social networking element to the site and you can also get involved with uploading and transcribing videos for the site.

This is a really useful tool for students and teachers. It would be nice if you could turn off the transcription and try to get students to work it out for themselves first, but if you wanted to do this, you could just find the same clip on YouTube and then send the students to Yappr to check their transcription.

Hope you enjoy this.

Related postings:
Best

Nik Peachey

No comments: