This is important because it seems that online education is going to be a Big Thing in this 21st century of ours. Khan Academy officially kicked things off several years ago with math and science videos. Nowadays you can find educational videos on just about any subject from dancing to how to think artistically about mathematics to crash courses on history, literature, and science.
You can also find EFL videos out there, but I haven't been able to find anything out there that's impressive. (If there's a reader out there who knows, please link me to something good if you would.)
So far the material I've seen has been a series of virtual copies (literally and figuratively) of the classroom experience, right down to a teacher standing between a stationary student (bound in place by the stationary camera) and a whiteboard. There's no physicality to the videos, nothing interactive or even interesting about these lessons. I think there will eventually be interesting EFL videos produced, but in this min-era before that happens I think there's probably a lot of doubt even if interesting interactive content can be produced in a video whose student base can neither listen or speak very smoothly.
EFL videos are necessarily different from ESL videos. ESL students live in countries where people speak English. Even if there immediate neighborhood isn't an English-speaking community, they should be able to experience people speaking English on a daily basis. ESL videos are, in other words, just videos. They watch TV and study a bit and their brain pieces the information together with stuff they absorb in their day-to-day lives. EFL students, on the other hand, are for the most part, except for multimedia outlets, cut off from an English speaking world.
I think it must be possible. I mean, everything's possible, right? It's just got to be worked at until it's figured out. I'm working on it presently, and so here are some notes I have towards what an interesting EFL video would look like:
- Whereas most educational videos are rational and artistic/interesting, a good EFL video lesson has got to be patterned and artistic/interesting, because the majority of the student base can't understand rambling, no matter how intelligent.
- Rambling might be useful for students' listening, though, since it is very common in typical conversation but hardly ever seen in the movies or music students get most of their English exposure from. So there probably should be rambling, but it's got to be controlled and for the students benefit. It's got to be intentional rambling, set up so that over the course of a course students could get used to the teacher's style of ramble and be able to follow him through it.
- Speaking of which, lessons should probably not be self-contained. Students can access information on grammar points or common phrases freely using online dictionaries or the textbooks that they likely already own. Since the only practical information self-contained videos offer are these kinds of disconnected bits of trivia, it would be best to avoid them in favor of strings of lessons that build not a point of knowledge, but rather a skill. Most Japanese students of English know very well how to give their name and ask someone how they're feeling, but very few of them can smoothly start and end such a conversation in a friendly manner. The videos should strive to fix communicative shortcomings like that.
- I don't know about EFL students, but as a JSL student I have a hell of a time reading anything more complex than manga or business letters. It might be worthwhile to do a chain of lessons analyzing a piece of poetry, or a prose style, or even just a very beautiful albeit complex sentence, slowly breaking the English down into bits and pieces and, at the end, putting it back together again. Hopefully this would, after several examples, teach students how to feel their way through a piece of prose more methodically and masterfully than they had been able to do before. (In fact you know what, if you're fluent in Japanese and want me to subscribe to your YouTube channel, you might make a few videos to help me get through a 村上春樹 book. ;)
- Unless you're absolutely awesome, nobody wants to sit through ten or more minutes of you talking, especially if they're there to study. Short, 3~7-minute videos have become popular with vloggers like #zefrank and the #vlogbrothers, but they cut their total time down by becoming information-dense and cutting out all their breaths. This isn't as easily done in an EFL video lesson, but it shouldn't be impossible (see #2). Or we could attack the problem from a different angle: instead of making the videos short by cutting out all the pesky breaths and talking really fast, we might instead rely on rigidity of structure and scripting, so that the students can quickly understand where we are in an episode and generally what we'll be talking about. This is what typical TV shows do, and even well-produced vlogs like Crash Course. (Maybe it seems obvious to point stuff like this out, but unless you draw the lines where you've been you might not know which direction to go. We be not meddling with these ideas in a small room, but rather in the vastness of the whole of imagination, laddies and ladies.)
- Accents are kind of a political dividing line in the world of second language acquisition. Opinions are wild and wide here: there are people who think adopting a more native-sounding accent at all is tantamount to throwing the shiny god-seed that is Your True Self under the bus of Mere Progress. There are others who think that the accent bestowed upon them by their mother tongue makes them, them, more than any other colony of human on the face of the earth, inept speakers of English.
Well, those opinions are both extreme and silly, but the problem remains that accents are a significant source of anxiety for EFL students, and this anxiety is only outmatched in scale by the lengths to which EFL students will go to not properly fix the problem for themselves.
I should clarify my own opinion on the issue: there are no proper or improper accents in the same way that there is no proper or improper way of sitting in a chair. Some people (usually teachers or parents) will get very passionate indeed if they see someone over which they have power sitting in a wrong way, but it is my unreserved opinion that there have in the history of the human race been terribly intelligent, hardworking people who changed the world for the better who also happened to slouch or cross their legs. There is no proper way to sit...but there are ways to sit which would make things easier for your body in the long run. Those ways of sitting also tend to be really difficult to maintain for long periods of time, which leads to slouching, leg-crossing, etc. Actually, the best bet is just not to sit for too long...says I, slouching here at my desk for the last 80 minutes or so.
Accents are essentially the same. There is a common way to speak in your neighborhood and over time people generally fall into the same patterns. It's like birdsong, but with a kerjillion more sound-pattern possibilities. If you're trying to learn a new pattern, though, your tongue will have a hard time jiving at first. For the people who work at their accent, many of them give up after becoming "good enough." That's fine in general, but for businesspeople, actors, or anyone who has to deal with customers in a foreign language, it would benefit them to work more on sounding like All the Other Folk. There are conformity benefits to this, socially speaking, but for the purposes of EFL, accent training trains not just your tongue, but also your ear and your mind. If you can speak English like an Australian, you're not likely to find the Australian accent (which makes today sound like to die and makes Japanese and Chinese EFL students giggle endlessly) very challenging anymore. It's also a confidence booster: the more quickly I can move my tongue to speak Japanese, the faster I can read; the faster I can read, the faster I can sing at Japanese karaoke; the faster I can sing at Japanese karaoke, the happier boy I be.
So: shadowing and repetition would also be a good bit of thing to incorporate into an EFL video lesson course. Again, the method needs to be considered: saying a sentence and then staring at the screen, waiting for an invisible student to repeat you is creepy. It's creepy when Dora the Explorer does it and it would be even creepier when you do it: so think of something better.
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