Misterduncan Presentation

Mister Duncan is a teacher, writer and filmmaker, who was born in Stafford, England. Thus he has a British accent. He started to produce his English teaching videos in 2006, and he has 68 of them so far. He posts them on Youtube, and made a separate channel for them.

In his first, introductory video Misteduncan claims that he started his series considering that it has become unavoidable to speak the language – globalization, trading and the 21^st century’s other phenomena made it impossible to avoid learning it, and companies and large businesses will need to employ people who can speak more than their own native language – and English is the obvious choice. Misterduncan’s target group is hard to identify. He emphasizes that his lessons are aimed at everyone, and even teachers are welcomed to watch them. I would argue with this „everyone”, since he uses long, well-built sentences with wide vocabulary, and although he usually teaches basic words and expressions, in order to completely understand his videos one has to speak in English around an intermediate level.

He speaks noticeably slower in his videos than the normal pace. To help understanding even more, he articulates and gesticulates strongly, and all his videos are subtitled. Written elements are present besides the subtitles, too, because every word and expression he teaches is also written in parenthesis near to the centre of the screen.

His teaching guideline is that grammar is less important (13^th video on grammar – from 1:08), and the crucial part of learning the language is acquiring a great, wide vocabulary. That is what his series intends to help with, so his videos are thematic - he chooses a common topic to introduce in each video, such as greetings, health, fame, time, technology, news and so on. Because of this, there is no relevant evolvement in his videos, they are not following each other – if one misses some part, he can rejoin it whenever.

The videos are always starting the same (Hi everybody, this is Misterduncan in England. Are you OK? I hope so. Are you happy? I hope so.), but other than that, they aren’t standardized. Their length vary a lot – from 4 to 37 minutes! In a lot of cases, he holds his lessons in a room, but that also changes sometimes – if it fits the topic, he introduces new locations, too. He seems to be encouraging and creative, and he tries to be funny and entertaining. That’s why he dresses up sometimes to different costumes (doctor, etc) and even brings teddies to his help (monkey, birds, and so on).

He talks about his topics in long sentences, and highlights the most important words by both emphasizing them and writing up them to the screen. Sometimes he explains the meaning of words by giving definitions. (video 8, 6.42)

What concerns his popularity, he can be said pretty famous. There are 62 thousand (61,982) subscribers to his Youtube-channel. There were 3 and a half million viewers of his channel (3,410,018), and in complete, his uploads were seen 31 million times (30,931,965). His first, introductory video received 5,5 million viewers (5.446.576 view), and more than 7 thousand people liked it (7.315 embernek tetszik).

A brief statistic of his views:

1.) 5.446.576

2.) 2,782,675

3.) 1,597,284

4.) 1,069,657

5.) 854,721

6.) 687,941

7.) 589,209

8.) 312,470

9.) 417,495

from 8-20: 300-500 000

from 20-45: 150-200 000

from 45-63: 100-200 000

from 64-68: around 20 000