"British Council – Our teachers” video series

Teachers’ nationality, dialect

• In every video there are about 4-5 teachers of different nationalities and all kinds of dialects.
• All of them are English teachers in Hong Kong.

Target group

Mostly elementary and pre-intermediate level:
• slow speech
• very understandable
• simple vocab

Teaching methods

• These videos are mostly vocab builders on everyday topics:
hobbies, daily routine, family, home, favorite food, favorite film, travels, career.
• Each video contains written questions on the current topic that each teacher answers about themselves.
• While the teachers are speaking, transcripts appear next to them, with the most important words and expressions that they use, useful sentences etc. The expressions appear in different colors and sizes. It facilitates understanding as well as memorizing. It kind of summarizes what they say and gives an outline of the new vocab.

Videos as teaching tools

• The videos start with a title and a picture about the topic. When using these videos in the classroom, the video can be stopped right at this point, and as a warmer, the teacher could ask students about what they can say about the pictures, activating students’ knowledge on the topic, creating a mindmap in connection with travels for example.
• Then give students questions that they will have to answer after watching the video. E.g.: What was John’s favorite country? How many countries has he been to? etc.
• After that, they watch it again focusing on only one speaker, and then they have to summarize what one of the teachers was talking about.
• Finally, they make a conversation in pairs and answer the same questions as the teachers did in the video about themselves.

Popularity

• British Council Hong Kong --> 1,416 subscribers, 52,331 views of channel, 1,188,269 views of uploads
• There are no comments about the videos.

Are the video-series an effective language learning device?

I think that if youtube language teaching video series are effective depends on how the teachers can make use of them. Probably they are more effective if a lesson is built around them and they are not just watched at home by the students.