For anyone looking to hone their language skills by listening to authentic news casts, the BBC can be a great resource. The BBC has news services for several of our languages, including: Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian. For each of these languages, you'll be able to find short videos on a diversity of topics - all narrated by native-speakers of the language of study. Since the news casts are short, students can watch them several times in order to get a general understanding of the topic discussed, or to listen for specific information and answer comprehension questions designed for their level. For example, students of Portuguese 1001 might watch the following video:
As students watch and listen, they might try to answer the following questions (to be written and answered in Portuguese, of course):
1. What is the crocodile's name?
2. What country is he from?
3. How much does he weigh?
4. What is the name of his human best friend?
5. How old is the crocodile?
6. Where are the residents of the village going to put the crocodile's body?
A class of 1002 students might watch the same video, but answer more complex questions and use the past tense (a useful modification to the practice, since the poor crocodile has passed away).
For our Category IV languages, short news videos can still be useful. We can design simple listening tasks for these students, like 'listen five times and write down all the numbers you hear', or 'describe all the people shown using at least seven different adjectives.'
If you have any other ideas of how short news casts might be used in class, or if you have a specific video you'd like to share, leave a note in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment