My thanks to all the people who commented here on the blog and also on Facebook and Twitter about the English Raven -- English Raven Junior collaboration on weather and seasons vocabulary. As promised, our next installment is ready to hit the web waves and I can tell you now: if you thought the weather was good, wait until you try the food!
English Raven Junior was in class form for this latest video; here are some tidbits for you to watch/listen out for:
- Find out why, according to ER Jnr, hamburgers can be bad for you
- Listen for the correlations between 'unhealthy-like' and 'healthy-don't like'
- Why do you think the onion is depicted with a tear in its eye?
- We call them capsicums here, while others call them peppers; ER Jnr has a suggestion along the lines of a compromise
- Ever seen a chicken hanging from a palm tree?
In any case, I'm delighted with how these vids are turning out, and wish I'd had access to them when I was teaching English to little children. They're completely unscripted and beautifully enhanced with a real child's world view of things. They're real -- something we see and hear so little of in English language learning materials where pretty much everything is carefully staged.
I think they're also precious as ELT materials because while a central lexical direction is presented, it is wonderfully enhanced with all the peripheral language and comments. Even if children don't quite understand everything they hear, I think the targeted vocabulary will be very salient and there is enough use of recasting, follow up questions, intonation and emphasis to create excellent initial exposure to the language in natural use.
And most importantly of all: they can be pretty bloody funny. Kids everywhere love funny.
So get on over and see English Raven Jnr strut his stuff with food vocabulary!
:-)
