My Challenge to You

And once you've done that, show it to your students and get them to do the same.

I for got to say two important things - no reading, and no editing the video. Upload it warts and all!

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In lessons, I find I'm referring more and more to Benny Lewis' blog Fluent in 3 Months. Not only does he offer a great set of specific techniques, but more importantly he gets to grips with THE problem of language learning - fear.

I've taken this challenge directly from his blog, more specifically here and here, although there are many others. It was a real challenge to me, since I've never really spoken Galician before. It's always been there, but Spanish has always been the easier option, and the conventional one, since locals automatically speak to guiris (foreigners) in Spanish.

But all the practice involved in making that short video really gave me a boost in confidence. I feel a bit like a Galician speaker now. Not a good speaker, true, but a speaker. i.e. not a learner.

I gave this task as homework to a group of approx B2 level adults last week. Although they all looked like rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler, I am chuffed to report that every one of them had done it. And it was a comfort for all of us to see all the others grappling with the same problems. Searching for words,  fluffing a verb form, that I've-made-a-mistake-so-should-I-just-leave-it-be-or-correct-myself feeling. And so on.

I'm certainly going to give them video homework again, and I think the second time, we'll all approach it with more courage.

Have you made speak-to-the-camera videos with your students? Do let me know.

And I can't wait to hear your second languages!

Too much too soon

I'm new to this blogging game - I must confess there's been a temptation as a newbie to write to impress - to report high moments, successes and victories. Having read one of Michelle's recent posts, I've realised it takes more cojones to report failures, flaws and disappointment. And this is a thing which I firmly believe to be more useful, both to self and colleagues.

I have been promising Guido @europeaantje, who blogs here that I would crack the problem of how to dub students' voices onto existing video, so this is what I tried with a small adult group earlier this week.

First of all, how to do the dubbing? My ever-supportive boss Anthony came up with a great simple solution - play the video muted but with subtitles, and record it as a screencast. Why didn't I think of that?

So we tried. We rehearsed a couple of small extracts of an episode of the Simpsons on DVD. So far so good.

But during recording, the wheels came off.

Firstly, natural speech is just too fast. My people were able to read with adequately good linking and intonation during rehearsal, but just couldn't keep up with native speaker speed. It seemed like all their hard work on pronunciation  disintegrated totally at L1 speed.

Secondly, a technical problem arose: During playback, we noticed a growing delay of audio with respect to video. It may have just been a combinations of my old laptop, heavy demands on the CPU, a bug in Ubuntu or whatever.

It clearly wasn't a total disaster - after all, we had done some perfectly good work on pronunciation and colloquial vocabulary. But I was hoping for a great finished product and something - I don't know - tighter.

I'm certainly not ruling out dubbing in class for ever, but I have learnt a couple of things:

1. As with all drama, to maintain interest, you have to be careful choosing scenes. The humour (or whatever the affective value is) has to come from the words. Cartoons rely more that live shows on visual and acoustic jokes, but those don't engage actor-students.

2. Choose something with a slow-to-moderate pace of dialogue.

3. Try out the video + screencast on a good long scene, say 3 minutes, beforehand, and check for delay.