A Video Instead of a Curse Word

In all the courses I have studied related to normal and abnormal language development (for my degree in education of the deaf) and those related to second/foreign language acquisition (my degree in EFL) there was one point on which there was perfect agreement. The only situation in which new vocabulary is remembered after a single exposure is when the exposure is truly memorable. That is why curse words are picked up and retained  so easily!

Since I can’t create a memorable experience in the classroom for all the many (oh, so many!) vocabulary items my deaf and hard of hearing students need to know and don’t, I’m turning once again to a video to do the job for me. Perhaps I’m not utilizing more than a fraction of what the video can be exploited for, but a “memorable experience” is what I need it to provide.

I encountered this short video on Jamie Keddie’s inspiring blog Lessonstream, a lesson entitled “An Unusual Recipe” 

 

Here is the video

There are three different worksheets.

The first one (entitled “red”) is simply intended to highlight the difference between “like” and “look like”. This confuses many of my students and we encounter it frequently in the material we use in class.

The second one (entitled “blue”) adds the word “real”. At first I wanted to add both “real” and “really” but most of my deaf students don’t differentiate between the two terms in L1. In addition, I find that even if they don’t translate these words accurately they still comprehend the meaning of the sentence they are in. As these students have such small vocabularies and there is so much to work on, I decided to “pick my fights” and not work on the difference between the two words.

The third one (entitled “green”) is for my small group of strong students. My stated goal is to practice vocabulary related to comparision (they have to watch another video as well), though I’m not really sure this was the best way to do it. Despite the fact that one should pick the material that fits the learning goal and not the other way around, I didn’t want these students to be the only ones who didn’t have an activity with the film. Not all these students have done it yet, so we’ll see.

western_spaghetti_red     western_spaghetti blue western_spaghetti_green

 

In any case, except for one girl who said the video was boring, the students liked the video! Whether or not they remember the vocabulary items remains to be seen.

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