Tomorrow I have two 3-hour classes in "the blue room", which is the classroom at school with the best tech access (in addition to an IWB and projector, there are a dozen computers with Internet access and headsets with mics).
I'll be starting those classes off with what I call a "videogloss". Similar to a dictogloss, but rather than re-constructing input, the idea is to construct output based on input that is purely visual.
Over the years, I've found that this works best with videos that have no spoken dialogue in them (it is possible to do it with other videos with the volume turned down, but I've generally found it doesn't work as well -- videos that are designed to communicate without dialogue do some things differently, and better, for the purposes of the videogloss).
And one of the very best sources of such videos is none other than Shaun the Sheep!
Here's the video I'm going to use in class tomorrow:
Following the initial viewing, learners will get together into groups and try to construct a summary of the story. We'll share and comment on those summaries together, then watch the video again and pause at various stages to give the learners the opportunity to try and construct potential dialogues for the scenes they've just seen. Again, we'll share and compare as a class, and I will try to help them out with any emergent language and specialised vocabulary they might need.
Following that, we'll discuss a variety of issues or topics that I think may be of interest to my learners:
1. Getting the kids to take a bath (vast majority of my students have kids!)
2. What to do when the hot water service breaks down
3. Handling phone calls where we can't understand what the person at the other end of the line is on about
And from there we'll head into a variety of specific tasks that fit these classes' learning and assessment goals for this term:
1. Handling short spoken exchanges
2. Handling telephone calls (and handling telephone calls for transactional purposes)
3. Reading instructions (for example, how to relight the pilot in a hot water system)
So some busy but fun (and hopefully quite practical) lessons in store for the morrow!
=D
