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

"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.

JenniferESL Presentation

Teacher’s nationality, accent:

Jennifer Lebedev grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Target group:

Jennifer makes videos for everyone: basic, intermediate and advanced level learners as well. She also has a series of videos aimed at improving the vocabulary of professionals. Other than that, she created a playlist for ESL teachers, in which she gives guidelines, how to make good instructional videos.

Teaching methods:

In the basic level grammar lesson series there are transcripts and Jennifer speaks very slowly, so that pupils can easily understand her.
In the intermediate category you can find pronunciation practising videos, the word of the day series, vocabulary and grammar learning, or even the slang-teaching videos can fall into this category. All these videos include transcript as well; however, the pace of Jennifer’s speech feels more natural.
Advanced learner’s and professional’s videos are not subtitled, the speech is natural, Jennifer only uses PowerPoint slides to illustrate what she is talking about.
The use of slides is peculiar to each and every category.

Instructional videos:

The most interesting thing about Jennifer is that she does not only provide videos for learners, but also for teachers of English. She encourages teachers to create their own instructional videos and gives guidelines as how to do it.
The instructional videos obviously come without transcript. They use text slides to illustrate speech and to show the most important ideas in writing. She also gives examples from her earlier videos to illustrate a given tip; e.g. Classroom presence video: Dress code (3:07-4:14)



Popularity:

68,469 subscribers, 3,337,261 viewers of channel, 24,435,045 views of uploads
Jennifer is relatively popular, considering the number of views of her channel and uploaded videos.

Everyday vocabulary with Jennifer

I really like JenniferESL's videos and I find her "How to make EFL videos" especially useful for our research.
Since we have to focus on how teachers not only use existing youtube videos in classroom, but how they can upload learning materials, Jennifer's instructions on how the production of such videos should work are extremely beneficial.
I started watching the videos in order of appearence. The first one, titled "Classroom presence" focuses on how a teacher in a classroom or a virtual classroom (i.e. video) should speak, dress and explains how important the setting of your instructional video is.

You can watch this first episode here.
You can find the whole series here.

JenniferESL

Hi!

I really like Erika's idea about what we should focus on.
I found a teacher called Jennifer, who has 11 different English teaching series on her youtube channel. These are:
1. Pronunciation of English Vowels
2. Word of the Day
3. English for Professionals
4. English Vocabulary Lessons
5. English Grammar Lessons
6. English Pronunciation Lessons
7. Advanced English
8. American Slang
9. Basic English Grammar Lessons
10. Common Mistakes in English
11. English Mini Lessons
She also has a website, where she gives tips for English teachers and also provides them with a English-teaching-video-producing guideline.
She is also involved in different other online English teaching activities, including another youtube video series, the Jim & Jen Show, where she collaborates with Jim Stroud, the Social Media Development Manager at Englichcafe.

British Council's English Teaching Video Series

I think it is a great idea what you've come up with Erika, we only had very vague ideas about what we should or could do in the past weeks, and it is so good to see that you were so creative on how to narrow down our topic. So thanks for your ideas! :)

We have talked about our topic to Nóra last time and she suggested we should look at use of youtube more from the teacher's point of view. That is, we could also include in our research in what ways a teacher can make use of any kind of videos in class, what kind of tasks s/he would prepare in connection to a movie trailer or a video about animals for example and how they can be used as supplementary teaching material in class. So maybe we should consider this idea as well.

I found a very nice English teaching series by the British Council, where different teachers of the British Council talk about a certain topic and their personal experiences in connection to that topic, such as family, favorite films, travels, careers etc.
You can take a look at one of the videos here:

Narrowing the research

Hello,

I really liked the videos and articles you have posted so far, they seem to be quite useful. Sorry for not taking part in the brainstorming proccess, I will make up for it in the following sections, since we seem to have ran out of time for random ideas (regardless of how good they are).

Before heading to find our direction with this research, I would also like to add a language teaching video from Youtube.

This is the first, introductory part of Misterduncan's series of English teaching videos. He has posted 67 videos so far, with varying length but usually around quarter of an hour per each. He seems to be posting a new teaching video every week.

I think it was important for us to get a grasp about how these different english teaching videos are present in Youtube. However, if we type in the keywords "english learning" on Youtube, it gives us eighty thousands videos as a result; and we don't have an easier case with "english teaching" either, because it presents sixty thousands of videos.

The most important question now is how to narrow down and continue with our topic. I have a proposal which might seem viable, so I hope you will read it by tomorrow and we can discuss it in class.

We obviously can't examine a lot of teaching videos, although I think these are the best material
to base the research on. What we can do, though, is to select 3 or 4 (3 might be better, because then each of us will have a separate subject) representative models of ELT video-series on Youtube, such as Misterduncan or Ausztrál Tom (the latter might not be that good of an example, but I am only proposing ideas which we can further evolve together). After selecting the videoseries which we could examine, we should put up the framework of the research - that is, which questions do we raise, which lines do we go along and what is the result we'd like to achieve both in the case of the individual series and both in the comparison of these series at the end.

To avoid being too vague again, I was thinking about questions like the following ones:

- The popularity of the selected series - how many people watched them. The answer will be more representative in the case of series, because we can draw conclusions about how many people regularly follow the lessons and benefit from them. I think it would be really interesting to examine the comments of the learners if we have time for that, too.

- The teaching methods and guidelines of the teachers in general.

- The target group and the aim of the teachers (e.g. common conversational things for the sake of tourists or advanced level teaching).

- The nationality and dialect of the teachers.

- And most importantly, the usage of the assets offered by online teaching, and in particular, how they gain advantages of the video teaching and the Youtube platform itself. Such important concepts as tagging, subtitling and so on should be further extended in this part.

If we can agree on a set of questions and aspects by which we examine the teaching series, we will have a quite accurate and broad consideration of them both individually and in respect to one another. At this point, we will be able to draw a comparison among them, and reach a conclusion (like how and why are they useful, creative, and so on - we will have enough data for this) and a final result of the research.

It is just a proposal and I am far from being sure whether it is good or not, but it is something we can discuss and evolve together, and it may be a good lead to a useful direction - or I hope so, because we need to find one. Anyway, I am sure we can make a sensible project regardless of using these ideas or not.

Thanks for considering this. :)

Erika