Three more videos recorded
Last week Betsy Parrish and I were in Saint Paul, Minnesota, recording three videos in adult ESL classrooms across the city. While it will be several months before they all are fully edited and ready for viewing and ordering as DVDs, it was clear that the videos are going to do a wonderful job of conveying techniques and nuances of teaching ESL.
In George Schooley’s class at the Hubbs Center for Lifelong Learning (part of the Saint Paul Public Schools), intermediate to advanced learners from a variety of backgrounds were engaged in highly interactive activities around reading material on birth order theory–a topic that everyone can relate to.
At the Arlington Hills Learning Center, run by the Minnesota Literacy Council, Jessica Jones led a session on listening skills, in which intermediate level learners listened to and watched video clips of interviews with people about experiences they had living in different cultures. Pre-, during, and post-listening activities guaranteed that the learners fully engaged with the material and each other.
At Neighborhood House, a community-based organization, Suzanne McCurdy taught a contextualized grammar lesson to intermediate learners. She focused on the past and present perfect tenses in the context of conversing about life histories–Suzanne’s and a couple of celebrities’. One delightful image I have is of a traditionally-garbed Somali woman talking with a young Latino fellow, filling him in on her knowledge of Marc Anthony (singer/actor and husband of Jennifer Lopez)!
Besides the tremendous skill and heart of these teachers, what strikes me over and over is the ability of the learners to be recorded on video without seeming even to notice that the cameras are there. We were able to film them at their completely natural best, fully engaged in the lessons. I can attribute that to the learners’ willingness and enthusiasm for the project, but also to the skill of our video crew, who manage some pretty incredible shots while somehow seeming to be relatively “invisible.” Quite amazing. I can’t wait to see how the videos turn out with our editing.
Three more class recordings are scheduled for April in the Washington, D.C., area. Mary Ann Florez and I will be on the scene!
