Video is so ubiquitous in modern life that we sometimes take students’ Comprehension for granted and fail to explore it to the fullest in class. This might happen because we’re not always clear about our goals. What exactly are we trying to achieve?
Is it primarily for listening comprehension or something else? There’s nothing wrong, of course, with using the beginning of a TED talk to introduce a reading activity, improving a dull coursebook lesson with a clip from Succession, or perhaps using a short viral video as a springboard for further discussion, role-play, writing, you name it – the possibilities are endless. But using video to help students become better listeners means focusing first and foremost on the skill of listening itself. This means you should:

1. Begin with a general-comprehension task…
Nothing new here, of course, but remember that students have only one pair of eyes: They’ll be either watching the video or looking at the task at any given time. So make sure that your first task is short and straightforward so that students can keep their eyes on the screen for as long as possible. I’ve lost count of the number of video-based lessons I have taught or observed in which the students – especially adults – spent far more time looking at the questions than at the video itself, which defeats the purpose of using video in the first place.

2. …but be sure to go beyond it.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I used to rely very heavily on gist tasks promoting top-down processing. “No need to understand every word” was probably as common in my repertoire of classroom language as “open your books.” Today, I try to strike a better balance between general-comprehension activities and activities to help students “squeeze the text dry,” so to speak. I try to discourage them from over-inferring and over-relying on contextual clues. This seems especially important as listening for gist is what most students already do anyway whenever they watch a video at home, and you want to use class time to help them squeeze the text dry so to speak.

3. Cut, slice, and chop.
When we teach listening, there’s a trade-off between length and depth: the longer a video segment is, the less we can explore it. No one in their right mind would play a 20-minute TED talk in a 90-minute lesson, of course, but you may not always be able to condense it into a 5-minute edit either. Sometimes we end up using video segments that are longer than ideal. But here’s the good news: Students don’t have to watch each and every video twice, in its entirety.

After you’ve played the whole segment once for general comprehension, you can simply select very short excerpts from the original passage and play them as many times as needed:

“What point exactly is she making here?”
“Watch this bit again. Do you get the joke?” “No? Focus on this expression. Try again.”
“Is this an opinion or a fact? How do you know?”

4. “Grade the task, not the text”: Not so simple.
This is another favorite mantra from the 1990s! As a novice teacher, I remember using a lot of different movie clips with my A1 and A2 students. After all, all I had to do was grade the task:

“Listen out for two adjectives.”
“Which color did the woman mention?”
“How many people are talking?” (!!!)

Students were able to answer most of my questions, of course, but in hindsight, I realize how frustrating it might have been for them to get all the answers right and still – in their words – “fail to understand 90%” of what was said. So here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: grading the task is not always enough. Just because a video segment is short, fun, and fits the text on page 73 like a glove doesn’t mean it can or should be used. Some videos are just too challenging and no amount of task-grading will change that.

5. Focus on connected speech.
When a B1/B2 student hears a sentence like “I would’ve gone with you guys, but I’m kind of tired of eating Chinese food”, they tend to miss the greyed-out words, which are usually heard as white noise:

I would gone (go?) with you guys, but I’m kind tired eating (eat?) Chinese food.

This doesn’t always matter as far as comprehension goes: If students manage to understand that the speaker didn’t go somewhere because they didn’t feel like eating Chinese food, fine. We don’t want them to get bogged down by every word or morpheme they miss.

But things are not so simple. Videos with too much “white noise” tend to hinder students’ comprehension and, in the long run, undermine their motivation. Also, listening plays a key role in long-term language acquisition. If students always overlook weak forms and other “unimportant” words, these words won’t get noticed and re-noticed, with obvious implications in terms of interlanguage restructuring.

So part of our job is – somewhat paradoxically – also to enable students to listen out for the things we sometimes ask them to ignore. In other words, help them develop what Richard Cauldwell refers to as perception skills:

“Listen to this sentence again. Pay attention to the pronunciation of at.”
“Listen to this sentence. How many words can you hear?”
“Did she say should cut or should’ve cut?”

6. Highlight new (and useful!) language if possible.
Try doing a series of video activities without any sort of language input, and then ask students “So, what have you learned today?” at the end. You’ll probably get a few blank stares! Students are not linguists, and it’s obviously hard for them to describe their learning gains in terms of skills and subskills. This means they need something more tangible to hold on to. Something they can describe at the dinner table or tweet about. Yes, I’m talking about lexis, grammar and pronunciation:

“We did a listening and she taught us lots of new expressions.”
“We watched a video and learned informal ways of reporting what people said.”

So, when you plan your next video-based listening lesson, be sure to include at least one activity highlighting some aspect of lexis, grammar or pronunciation that you think your students will both profit from and perceive as useful.