In class on Monday, we watched a video of the Scene Performance activity, which showed EFL students acting out clips of TV shows as part of a larger project focusing on pronunciation.

One of the activities in the larger project was called mirroring, in which students read along with short TV clips and trying to match the actors’ pronunciation and intonation.  The activity seemed like one that could be adapted to various levels of students, so it seemed like a good one to try for a pronunciation lesson for the Peace Resource Center, where I’ve been subbing.  Since the classes are drop-in, teachers aren’t able to predict which students will attend, and it can be difficult to plan lessons without knowing specific student level/interests/goals, etc.

I decided to find clips that focused on the theme of food, a universal topic that could be relevant for all students.  Even beginning level ESL students tend to have some familiarity with English used in daily routines like shopping, etc. The first clip (~25 seconds), from Parks and Rec, showed 2 characters shopping, and had a brief exchange at the cash register. In the second short clip (~25 seconds), the same character is eating a meal with friends; a friend offers him food that he doesn’t like. In the 3^rd, longer clip (over a minute long), from the show The Office (the US version), one of the characters explains how to cook a meal at work using only vending machine ingredients. The scene used recognizable language like the names of food and common kitchen appliances that students of all levels would be familiar with.

I typed up transcripts for each of the clips and made 2 different cloze dictations for each clip, one missing only a few words for lower-level students, and another missing more words for higher-level students.

Only one student showed up to class, a higher-level student who has very good speaking, reading and writing skills, but could work on improving listening comprehension and pronunciation.  Because the class was two hours long, we had time to do all three clips.  First I asked questions related to the video. Before the first clip, we talked about shopping, favorite places to buy food and other supplies.  I gave a brief into to the clip, and then we watched it.  After that, I replayed the clip several times while the student filled in the missing words on the cloze worksheet.  I gave him a copy of the transcript to check against his sheet, and after that we answered questions that he had about the vocabulary.  Then we read the transcript together a few times, played the clip again and mirrored it a few times.  We reviewed the  pronunciation and he practiced a few phrases.  Before the second clip we talked about favorite and least favorite foods, favorite restaurants, etc.  We followed the same steps for that clip.  For the third clip, we talked about cooking and ingredients for favorite foods.  We did more mirroring with the clip in order to focus on specific pronunciation issues.

The activity did seem to help the student with some pronunciation issues and taught him a few new phrases and vocabulary.  It also functioned as an informal assessment because it highlighted specific areas of grammar and vocab that could be used to help the student in future lessons.  If I did this activity again in a drop-in class, after using the clips, I would ask the student to write his own short dialogue based on his own daily life.  We could check the vocabulary and grammar and then practice the pronunciation of that dialogue. Time-permitting, there could be more focused work on pronunciation.

-Willow Barnosky