Documentaries as an audiovisual aid in english teaching at university

Abstract

The paper deals with possible ways to use documentaries effectively as an audiovisual aid when teaching English as a foreign language to university students. It offers recommendations on how the National Geographic documentary Megacities: London can be used when teaching the topic On the Move to university students in the course in Oral and Written English.

The documentary is easily broken down into four sections. A set of activities and tasks suggested is based on a three-stage model that involves pre-viewing, while-viewing and post-viewing stages. The pre-viewing activities are mainly of introductory and anticipatory character. They involve questions that introduce the topic and issues the section deals with and make students anticipate what they are going to see, or they can also be based on reading tasks set and done as homework before the video lesson.

The while-viewing activities of each section comprise the first viewing and comprehension activities. The former involve questions designed to check general comprehension of the section whereas the latter are aimed at detailed comprehension of the section. The comprehension tasks further break down the section into a number of successive episodes (clips) and can vary greatly. They involve multiple-choice questions, gap-fillings tasks, sentence completion, true/false statements, finding and correcting mistakes, matching tasks, defining what figures (numbers, symbols) refer to. Vocabulary exercises are usually combined with comprehension tasks. They comprise matching words with their definitions before watching; finding words or expressions in the preceding exercise, using their definitions/explanations or synonyms; reading the definitions of the words that are used in the extract and then noting them down while watching/listening to it; first matching the words to their definitions, then using them to fill in the gaps in the extract before watching it, and finally watching the extract and checking.

The post-viewing, or follow-up, activities involve discussion, in which students share their impressions of and views on what they have heard and seen and compare the different aspects ofLondon’s infrastructure and traffic control with those in Kyiv, Kharkiv or other Ukrainian cities. Follow-up activities can also involve writing tasks and projects that should be given as homework as they are time-consuming and may require elaborate preparation. Projects are to be done within a specified period of time and then presented in Power Point or another presentation form.