Short Films for Reading Comprehension – Take Three!

This is the third part of my experiment in using video to teach reading comprehension strategies.

Take One, focusing on WH questions, can be found here.

Take Two, highlighting ” support your answer” type questions, can be found here.

This exercise focuses on “main idea” type questions. The purpose is to make the following message more memorable:

The distractors given are usually true sentences (or facts) from the text. But they are not the main idea. So you must read the distractors carefully.

I used three videos though only showed the students two. The first exercise relates to the “Power of Words one we saw two weeks ago. It is a very memorable video and I see no reason not to use the same video for multiple purposes.

The second one is a very short commercial. I don’t know where I heard about this one. Here it is:

This one I learned at the conference from Jamie Keddie’s excellent talk and CD. In his talk he used it completely differently. I hope to try some of the strategies he used in the future. However, I don’t think they were designed for a class of 33 struglling adult students (note: I’m not being inconsistent with the numbers, we are now a class of 33!). In addition, I’m pursuing a different agenda at the moment.

Here is the worksheet I used:

main idea

 

Overall I was pleased with results. The students loved the videos and did not find them childish or unsuitable. I overheard two students discussing the fact that I show them really educational commercials. However, one student complained that the worksheet was too easy. Easy as in the answers were too easy to find (most certainly not the level of English!). I replied that I wanted the point to be clear, that they would see how all the distractors relate to vocabulary and information that IS there and that they must be careful. I added that if the examples were very hard we would have to spend a long time on the exercise (which we didn’t) and perhaps the point wouldn’t have come across so clearly.

Now I’m not as sure. I don’t know if the exercise shouldn’t have been harder. It would certainly be difficult to think of more difficult distractors.

On the other hand, only one student complained.

I’ll have to think about it. Lets see how carefully they treat the “main idea” questions in the tasks they have.

 

 

4 thoughts on “Short Films for Reading Comprehension – Take Three!”

  1. The idea of quickly identifying the main idea – and focusing on that is quite brilliant.

    I will definitely make use of this unit!

    thanks, Naomi
    Judih

  2. I would like to thank you for sharing your work with us.
    I have been using most of the ideas and my pupils love it.
    Hava

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *