Jacob Brown

To Vlog or Not to Vlog?

In this reflection, I would like to explore a potentially rich resource for listening activities: the video blog, or “vlog.” As communicative language instructors, we are challenged to incorporate multimedia, technology, and “authentic” materials—or, materials not specifically made for pedagogical purposes—into our classrooms. The vlog, however, serves as all three of these things. Open up Youtube, type in virtually anything you can think of, whether science or self-help or sewing techniques, and you will likely find at least dozens of videos on the topic, all of which follow the same simple, talking head-style format: the vlogger, viewed in close-up, addresses the camera and speaks. While some vloggers only post one or a handful of videos, others upload videos regularly and even have enormous followings. While I have a few vlogs I follow in English and Spanish, recently I have branched out to listening to a few in Portuguese in order to practice listening. Watching vlogs has certainly helped me to practice my own listening comprehension skills at home, but would they make an effective classroom resource? Possibly, but there would be obstacles. Vlogs can be short or very long depending on the loquaciousness of the vlogger, but usually they are about ten minutes in length. Furthermore, since vlogs are authentic materials, vloggers speak at a pace that to them may seem natural, but to beginner students may seem impossibly fast.

All this considered, I would argue that vlogs would be an excellent resource for developing listening skills on the strict condition that teachers incorporate strategies suggested by Communicative Language Teaching in Action by Klaus Brandl and the Foreign Language

Teaching Methods website. But what would this look like in practice? To briefly outline an example, I would like to borrow popular Brasilian vlogger Julie Jolie’s video “Universidade nos EUA X BRASIL” and explain how I would present it in a class. In the video, which runs nearly 12 minutes, Jolie talks about differences she has noticed between the United States and Brasilian university systems. Given the length of the video and the rapid rate at which she speaks, I would break a lesson based on the video into three parts, as both Brandl and the FLTM website suggest: pre-listening, listening, and post-listening. For pre-listening, I would first set up a brief, timed discussion in which students should pair up and respond to questions such as, “How would you describe your university to someone from another country? What are your classes like? What about your professors? Do you live on campus? Are you in any organizations? Is the campus dining any good?” and so on. This will help get students in the groove of thinking about the topic of the video. Furthermore, it would also be helpful to review or introduce vocabulary used in the video, such as curso (major), graduação (undergraduate), formar-se (to graduate), and

“minor”/”major” (can be used via code-switch). For the listening portion of the activity, I would prepare listening tasks such as “true or false” questions or short answer questions as Brandl suggests. These tasks would correspond to important chunks of the video, which we would pause, discuss, and repeat as needed (I do not believe it would be necessary to watch the entire video, but rather key “passages” that correspond to the listening tasks). Finally, for the post- listening activity I would prefer to assign a task “whose purpose it is to exploit and extend the information of the students heard or learned in the listening/viewing section of the lesson,” such as writing an email to a pen pal in Brasil about a typical day in your university (Brandl 250). In this activity, which could be started in class and finished at home, students would be able to talk about themselves and take advantage of practicing vocabulary they learned in the video. Jacob Brown

All together, the pre-listening, listening, and post-listening activities around Jolie’s vlog incorporate not only listening but also speaking, reading, writing, and culture into the lesson.

Moreover, the lesson and materials would be personalized in a way that students could easily relate to and talk about. To conclude, given a good amount of preparation, communicative language teachers need not fear the vlog, which could potentially serve as a great classroom resource.