Using captioned videos for English as a second language or ESL

We found out that 22frames.com is becoming a popular site for learning English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL). It turns out that watching captioned videos provides a way to not only learn formal and informal English, but also cultural concepts. To find videos, you can browse through categories or make caption-only video searches on your interests. Even more, we have been devoting significant time and resources to developing specific features for English learning and teaching that are motivated by our users' feedback. We are leveraging existing technology (crawlers, Infinite Ears, and web APIs) to make this process as efficient and open as possible. Some of the videos found here are only viewable in the United States; however, all the videos we use for our ESL/EFL features will be viewable both inside and outside of the United States. Do you want updates on what we do with English learning and teaching? Simply follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Features

We are busy exploring features that many users have emailed us about. The first ones we are considering will can help you use videos to learn and teach: commonly mispronounced words, idioms, and slang phrases. We processed thousands of videos and found ones that illustrate these kinds of phrases. On each page for a video that uses a phrase we provide menus that will even take you to the approximate times the phrases are spoken. Watching an entire video is not necessary.

There is a lot more that we can do as we have built quite a few tools in the past that could facilitate our new ESL/EFL efforts. To illustrate, we have tens of thousands of captioned videos spanning several topics--our homepage shows this. Just as we are able to create our current features, we could create ESL tools for business, nursing, etc. Again, we just need to see what people actually want rather than arbitrarily building things. Further, we do not want to be redundant and build something that's already available.

There's a lot out there on the web to find if you want more ideas on how to use captioned videos as part of ESL lessons.

In general, the information we found offers the following pieces of advice:

• Students should watch captioned videos outside of class to increase reading comprehension and vocabulary. (Feedback from a few 22frames.com users shows that music related videos are particularly interesting to young students as they teach them 'hip words' and slang that [young] native English speakers often use.)
• As part of in-class lessons, teachers can create worksheets for students to complete after viewing videos. Worksheet questions can ask students what they remember from a video like: (a) scenes, (b) character names, (c) lines of the characters, and (4) slang and certain idiomatic expressions within these lines. Students can even propose questions they might have about the video.
• Role play is also an attractive type of exercise, especially for videos involving acting roles. Students can break into groups and act out the roles of different characters. (We also suggest searching 22frames.com for interview-based videos as they are typically good for 2 person groups.)
• While watching videos, audio can be muted to test how well students can read and comprehend the concept/plot of a video.
• Sometimes the audio and caption text are not properly synchronized. Further, some words might be missing. Teachers should be aware of these limitations when recommending videos.

Working with us

If you are a service that's interested in extending our work in helping teach people English, perhaps even other languages, let us know. For example, the EmbedPlus third-party YouTube embed tool is being used to improve the user-experience for the types of things described on this page. In particular, the EmbedPlus player is currently being used to help answer the question: How do you pronounce words in English? It offers a more substantial answer to the question than the common mispronunciation link we provide in the section above. In fact, EmbedPlus is focusing on thousands of dictionary words. Check out the progress by clicking one of the links below: