Narrate a video in the TL like this to captivate your students and create useful input that they will give back to you

Abstract:  This method creates a process for digesting an artifact (a video short taken from YouTube) and creating a series of mini-lessons about it that each have a beginning and ending.  As you give these short lessons, you will be speaking the Target Language in a meaningful way that will be slightly more than most of your students can handle for much of the time.  By the end you will receive evidence that almost all of them heard and retained what you said and were able to leverage the new constructs to create meaningful output that narrates the story of the video short that you selected. 

Introduction

I would like to before offering any details of this awesome technique give credit to Dr. Bob Patrick, Latin teacher extraordinaire in Gwinnett County, Georgia, for taking the time to talk to me about this tool.  His blog is first class and highly well known, and if you haven’t taken a look at it, go to http://latinbestpracticescir.wordpress.com/, by all means.

The longer I teach, the more I understand the power of input as the single greatest predictor of fluid, useful output that will come out of my students.  As often as possible, I want my students to have heard from me (and elsewhere) many, many times the phrases, chunks, and stubs that I expect them ultimately to produce.  We all know that this input must be “meaningful,” but I would like to tease apart what that means a bit here.  In my first career I studied Speech Communication, which is the study of communication between pairs, small groups, and one person to many.  In that world, the focus is the communication of ideas memorably and persuasively.  In this context I learned about the concept of primacy and recency, which says nothing more than that we tend to remember the beginnings of messages and the ends of them, and that what’s in the middle, not so much (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_position_effect for more explanation).

At the time, the message to me as a student who was interested in being memorable was clear:  Create lots of beginnings and endings, and retention of what you say will go up.  This will ring true to you in the classroom who feel that sense of satisfaction and relief when you can finally get the kids to study transitional words and phrases (in Spanish, primero, entonces, luego, and the like, and then later phrases like por eso, es decir, and the useful asi que).  To me these are satisfying because they help students to create signposts in their speech, to say, “OK, pay attention, here comes the next ‘beginning.’” (or in the case of por fin and others, the next ending).  We instinctively know we have a shot at being memorable with those in the mix.

What the activity that Dr. Patrick taught me does is to create a process for digesting a long message (a video short taken from YouTube) and creating a series of mini-lessons about it that each (naturally) have a beginning and ending.  As you give these short lessons, you will be speaking the Target Language in a meaningful way that will be slightly more than most of your students can handle for much of the time you do it.  By the end, however, you will receive evidence from the students that almost all of them heard and retained what you said and were able to leverage the new constructs to create meaningful output that narrates the story of the video short that you selected. 

Backward design

To decide what video short you wish to go get, start with the end in mind, like in so much of what you do.  Will you be using your short video primarily to recycle or to introduce new material?  For my case study, I knew that my Spanish 3 classes were going to see sports vocabulary in a narrative context in the coming weeks (an early chapter in Realidades, level 3, for those who use that), which is to say, preterit(e) and imperfect.  The students had been introduced to some sports and some narration the prior year, but they were rusty, as this was September of a new year.  So I knew that looking for a brief movie about sports would be appropriate.

The way Dr. Patrick teaches this technique is that he uses (or tends to use) movies that have no spoken language in them.  They are all action (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Anw_bhEzsys for an example).  I chose to use a movie that occurred in English with Spanish subtitles, although I also looked for the entire thing to be dubbed into Spanish.  This case study occurred in the fall of 2014, with the World Cup having recently finished in Brasil.  I knew from a technique known as “Circling with Balls” also learned from Dr. Patrick (see http://www.benslavic.com/circling-with-balls.html for a valuable exposition on this), a great deal about my students’ interests, and several of my students in my various classes were avid futbolistas.  The commercial is hosted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7VQna0VovA, among other locations.

To me, this commercial was nearly perfect, in that it used sports vocabulary, set a scene and then told a story (ergo, perfect for reviewing preterit and imperfect), and was highly topical with what was going on in many of my students’ lives.   It, of course, had disadvantages, and yours will, too.  First, at 5 minutes long, it had a lot of detail, and performed actions that I was not comfortable scaffolding/squeezing into their Spanish lessons in the month that I knew that I would be teaching using this tool.   Secondly, the characters spoke English, but this was a minor distraction.  Third, it used a kind of perspective-switching technique that I did not relish having to work around, as the perspective of the film switched rapidly in the opening minute between boys playing “pick up” soccer games in Rio and famous futbol players doing similar movements in a stadium.  My fears, however, were warrantless.  There was little to no issue and when the kids produced their own version of the commercial for me at the end of the project.  That’s the idea I’d leave you with.  A good video choice based on topic and relevance will carry itself past any potential snags.

Procedure

Every day for a month, I stopped class with 5 minutes to go and we played the video, in pieces (using the terms from my intro, I created a daily dose of primacy and recency).  On some days, I played a piece first, and then narrated it.  On others, especially after the routine was established, I narrated first, and then played a piece, drawing out from the students what they could hear and understand before reinforcing it via the video.  We never saw the entire story of the video in the beginning, but slowly worked our way towards it.  They saw the first “trozo” or chunk many more times than the sections deep in the interior.

Sometimes I orally presented my narrations, sometimes I wrote them on the board.  I never asked the students to write them down, and therefore few did much note-taking during these last five minutes of each day.  I “popped up” any grammar that got addressed by quickly confirming any rationale for why I was using preterit or imperfect.  Here are two examples of the level of Spanish I used in my narrations:

Al principio, unos chicos jugaban fútbol en las calles de Río de Janeiro.  Pasaban, rebotaban, y cabeceaban la pelota, jugando entre los callejones, techos de zinc, y el graffiti de la Flavela.  De repente, apareció un tren en la calle y casí pegó a uno de los muchachos.  Sin embargo, apenas lo evitó, girando de su camino.

And

Un fan brasileño, aburrido con el nuevo futbol de los clones, secuestró a los futbolistas más famosos en el mundo, y los convenció a jugar un partido más contra los clones.

Thus, each day I would play the video, usually from the beginning, in pieces, and then hit pause.  I would then narrate that piece back to the class, or, depending on the day, narrate the next piece.  I would also hit pause here and there and ask a lot of “circling” questions (see link above) about the content of the film, trying to make the pieces of Spanish I was offering more “sticky” in the minds of my students.  I said things like:

¿Jugaban futbol en Río o jugaban beísbol en Río?  ¿El chico cabeceaba la pelota o comía la pelota?

¿El fan brasileño secuestró a los futbolistas o los futbolistas secuestraron al fan brasileño?  ¿Cómo se dice “secuestró” en inglés?

I would also play back pieces in review after having played them in the prior days and ask the students in pairs to write a bit of narration for that particular segment, or narrate the pieces on the fly to each while I went around and listened. 

The technique was not very strict or very fancy, but I want to be clear that I always gave several examples of input for any part of the film before asking for output from the kids.  I wanted chunks and pieces getting sticky in their minds only to then have them be utilized. 

Sub Day

And how was this output to be produced?  That is my favorite part of this little experiment, although you certainly wouldn’t have to do it this way.  Dr. Patrick taught me that using this technique would be an excellent way to get the kids productive on a “sub” day, because as long as someone could run the projector, the class could then play back the chunks of the film while you aren’t there and narrate the commercial in a meaningful way that would occupy the period.  This beats doing “busy work” worksheets, in my estimation!

In the days leading up to my planned absence (I was presenting at a conference), I designated someone to be a timekeeper and someone to be a media person, for each class.  I wrote their names on the instructions that were distributed to all students, and created a procedure for how the period should occur.   The substitute teacher gave out this sheet, as well as some screen captures (images) from the commercial that they could use as focal points:

To make images like this, use the "PrntScrn" button on your keyboard and then "Paste" the image into Word, double click the image, then manipulate it using these two tools:

I also looked at my students’ levels performance in the class and created teams of two and three, associating students of similar ability together.  I tend not to place “strong” students with “weak” ones hoping that one will teach the other and that one will be full of gratitude for the example, but instead let two “weaker” students at least try to produce what they can.

Results

The results?  You can see them here.  I’m showing several highly comprehensible examples, but these were not the only ones, by far.  These students who were the most successful caught the nuance of the turns of phrases that I was repeating and produced them on their works.  You can see the vocabulary and phrasing throughout their work, even though some of it had not yet formally been “taught” except for inside this five-minute, closing section.  To zoom in on the text you want to magnify, hit "Ctrl" plus the + sign until you are able to see the writing.  To get back to a normal screen, hit "Ctrl" plus 0.

Here is one example that I would consider slightly less comprehensible, although every student represented here demonstrates the tendencies you see in this example, albeit not to the same degree.  These students clearly were not only relying on what they might have acquired but were instead forcing some language onto the paper that they had never heard or processed before the day of the assignment.  You can tell right away from the several infinitives:

Conclusion

What strikes me most about this method is that it teaches a level of narrative sophistication and complexity that without the structure of the daily five minutes of media would not be possible.  Indeed, in other subsequent contexts, my students were much less comprehensible in their writing (when doing typical “exercise,” cloze-type activities), but because I could make reference to this experience, they could self-correct much better than if we had not done it.  In my layperson mind, I imagined them using two totally different parts of their brains to perform the two types of tasks.  And I prefer the Spanish they produced here!!

Motivation is key to learning a new language, I don’t have to tell you.  Because we weren’t seeing the entire commercial in one sitting, the kids wanted to close strong at the end of every lesson so that we could open the curtain a bit more on the “FIFA” story.  Many students went outside of class and watched the commercial on YouTube. They came back to me at times asking me how to say this bit or that in anticipation of what we would do in class.  Bits of speech from the commercial became "catch phrases" inside the other parts of the classes, and became part of our identity as a cohort.  That was an unintended benefit.

Don’t forget my intro, that primacy and recency are memorable.  By digesting this big message into about 20 little beginnings and endings, I found that my students could produce ideas at a higher level.  What I’d like to hear from you regarding this technique is how you think the input should be designed.  Written?  Passed out?  Spoken?  Before, or after showing the artifact?  Thanks for reading!

Greg Sanchez is a FL teacher consultant in the metro Atlanta area.  You can see more about him at:

GregSanchezConsulting.com and
TeachersPayTeachers.com/store/PicantePractices

Thanks to the Cobb County students where Greg taught this semester for allowing him to practice this technique with them and to those who allowed me to share their results!