Week 3. ( 課文) 用影片學英文

Week 3. Learning a Language through Video

Hopefully, Marianna Pascal’s video gave you some insight into how attitude affects learning and how having the proper attitude can facilitate your communication skills. As she says, students sometimes try to make things too complicated, get stuck searching for the perfect word, or lack confidence and are afraid to try to communicate.

If you are motivated, there are lots of great free resources for you to try to help you improve your English ability. This lesson will introduce four sites that can give you hours of practice on improving your listening and vocabulary skills. In addition, you may learn something about science, history, education, and different cultures.

The Voice of America website has videos with tapescripts, vocabulary lists, learning strategies, and quizzes. You can click at the top of the page to try Beginning Level, Intermediate Level, or Advanced Level.  In addition, at the far right, there is a Video button you can click to get to 1-minute Video lessons that introduce vocabulary, phrases, and idioms.

TED has numerous videos that are generally at an intermediate or advanced level.  When you go to the website, you can click on Watch at the top and you will see a drop-down menu. You can choose TED Talks or TED-Ed Videos.  If you click on TED Talks, you can then search by topic or language. If you choose Chinese, it will show you a list of talks that have Chinese subtitles and tapescripts.  If you click on TED-ED Videos, you will find shorter videos developed by educators, many with Chinese subtitles. 

The British Council Learn English website has a section called Skills, where you can click on Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking.  It also has a menu for Grammar, Vocabulary, and Business English practice.  At the top of the page there are links especially for kids and teenagers.  There is a way to set the interface to Chinese, but most of the time that just translates the basic intro to the activities. The English videos and exercises are all-English.

Finally, you can try ESLVideo, which has a menu with choices of Level, Songs, Pronunciation, and Grammar. Most of the videos will have transcripts and quizzes. 

While it may be intimidating and challenging at first, you will soon get used to using these all-English websites.