Description of the Learning Activities
Methodology
Timing (minutes)
Materials/ Equipment Required
This activity is used for learners to learn how to understand dialogue as a basic literacy skill.
Voscreen is a free website aimed at helping users improve their English language skills on their own through short video clips. Learning and improving English is more enjoyable than ever with Voscreen video learning environment since it is based on video extracts obtained from youtube. When a user starts, she/he has to select his native language, watch the clip, and then choose the accurate translation to the short phrase uttered in the clip. For each correctly selected translation, he gets a point and moves on to the next clip in the series. The homophone app is intended as an educational app that includes elements of gamification to motivate user behavior, whereas the punctuation app is intended as a serious game where literacy-skill improvement is the primary goal rather than entertainment.
This activity is adopted from the project GBL4ESL, Game Based Learning:
Face-to-face:
Voscreen lends itself perfectly to practice paraphrasing. The teacher should choose the level or grammar structure, play the clip, and ask students to paraphrase what they’ve just heard. Compare their ideas and, finally, check with the two options offered by Voscreen.
Play a random clip. Ask your students to imagine what happened after/before the scene they see. It’s a great way of revising past tenses or to come up with predictions. The more advanced the level, the more complex storylines might be encouraged.
If the teacher chooses the Questions or What category in the VoStructure tab, she will get access to a series of clips featuring different types of questions. Play a clip, and ask students to write down answer(s) to the questions asked in the video. It can be a speed competition (who comes up with a logical answer first) or about imagination (who comes up with the most logical answers in the time given).
The most suitable categories are the ones containing simple sentences. The game can be played to practice sentence stress: differentiate between content and structure words and see whether the meaning of the sentence changes once different words are stressed. Given the clips already serve as a pronunciation model, students will either try to recreate what is heard or modify it to convey different meaning (if possible)
Following the game, the following discussion questions can be used to engage students in further discussion.
60
Tablets or computers
Learners can access the game from Link
Online:
The activity can take place in the virtual classroom.
The teacher will ask participants to set up the game on their computers or tablets and then similarly to the face-to- face environment the activity will unfold in the virtual classroom.
60
Online platform (e.g. ZOOM, Microsoft Teams)