An introduction to
The Basics & The New Lessons
www.real-english.com
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Outline
• The Basics for those new to Real English
• What’s different about Real English?
• Adding a 2.0 Social Dimension to a
Traditional Site
• On the Street: Our Filming Campaigns
• MAIN SECTION – The New Lessons:
MULTImedia as a Necessity
• The Problem of a Cool Domain Name
• Lesson Conclusions
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The Basics Part 1
• Real English is primarily an online program for
learning English as a Second of Foreign
Language,
• used by teachers in the classroom who project
from their computers, and by
• students working on their own.
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The Basics Part 2
• The entire Real English site, including
all videos and lessons, are both free
and free-access (only disadvantage in
my opinion: no newsletter possible).
• It has a long history, begun in 1992.
• New videos and lessons have been
added every year since its creation.
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The Basics Part 3
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of
ESL – EFL learning sites on the web.
What makes Real English different?
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The originality is in the nature of the 2
types of content:
1 - We will look at part of a Real English video
to illustrate the aspect of spontaneity which
permeates Real English.
2 - Beginning in 2005, I began to change the
exercises for the videos. All the lessons now
have unique characteristics, as we shall see in
a few minutes…
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The Real English videos do not
include any actors. I suppose
pedagogical arguments can be
made for slow, artificial speech,
but our first keyword is
spontaneity, with all the
difficulties which it creates in
practice.
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Traditional Site becomes \"Social\" thanks to Google Friend Connect
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Our street interview campaigns
are always fun, but they are also
complicated affairs which
deserve a separate
presentation. Beginning with
slide 11 we will look at some of
the final results of these
interview campaigns.
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Why are the Filming Campaigns So Complicated?
• Question Preparation (Will they use our target language
or structure in their replies?)
• Approaching people in the street (Who to approach?
The laughing couple! Will they accept to sign a Release
Form? – Yes 1/3, No 2/3)
• One out of ten interviewees are finally used in Real
English edits. There are limits, or \"acceptable levels of
spontaneity\", depending on the speed of delivery,
general comprehensibility (mumbling, extreme regional
accents). I also make mistakes while filming. Finally, we
want people who are simply interesting for one reason
or another, which also contributes to the 1 out of
10 ratio.
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Example of a Lesson Index Page: http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/unit29.html
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Example: What do you like to do for fun? (like to do/like doing):
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-1.htm:
Let’s look at lesson 29, Exercise 1
As you can see in this example in
Exercise 1, Joe speaks normally. So, he’s
hard to understand.
We want to facilitate oral comprehension. We don’t want
to test students, especially not at this point. Therefore,
the additional audio file is a summary of what Joe
says, i.e., Joe’s first and simplified reply to What do you
like to do for fun?
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Example: What do you like to do for fun? (like to do/like doing):
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-1.htm:
Let’s look at lesson 29, Exercise 1
Note that this audio file, a summary
of the essential part of his reply in
the video, begins to present the
student with New Vocabulary in a
casual way.
Joe’s last words are \"[I like] sitting around with folks,
talking.\"
On the other hand, \"sitting around with folks, talking\" is
not included in the exercise as a correct answer. Instead,
the student can choose the answer including socializing,
which of course is a synonym. He might begin to learn new
vocabulary by a process of elimination in this MC exercise.
If not, he will learn socialize in exercise 5.
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29 - What do you like to do for fun?
An example for this presentation Link:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-1.htm
Let’s look again at the video only on the
same page
lesson 29, Exercise 1
Joe’s interview, the first one in lesson 29, is 32 seconds
long. However, a total of 6 exercise pages (including 19
\"questions\") are necessary to cover the new vocabulary and
grammar he uses during those 32 seconds.
Therefore, in the next 7 pages of this presentation, we will
look only at the exercises necessary for understanding Joe’s
32 seconds. The entire video is over 6 minutes long, but of
course we are not going to cover the entire lesson during
this presentation.
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Next Exercise : What do you like to do for fun? Link to Exercise 2
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-2.htm:
We want to be sure the student
understands the more difficult, natural
language that Joe uses during his
interview, in addition to the lesson’s
key structure like to do/like doing.
He begins with this reply: That’s a
great question. I was just asking
myself that the other day.
Since this is the first time we hear a reflexive pronoun in Real
English, we include a relevant grammar page.
(link to Exercise 2b) http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-2b.htm
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Next Exercise : What do you like to do for fun? Link to Exercise 2
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-2.htm:
Another interesting point about Exercise 2
concerns the possibilities offered by Hot
Potatoes.
This particular HP exercise is called a Hybrid
JQuiz. If the student is wrong typing X number
of times, then the exercise transforms itself into a Multiple
Choice. The student is never lost if he tries to answer.
Also, there are multiple correct answers when the answer
is typed. In this particular case, there are 6 correct answers,
such as \"What do you like to do for fun?\" or \"Joe, what do you
like doing for fun?\". I think motivation increases when the
student has to carry out the more difficult job of typing. For
some exercises, there are as many as 100 possible typed,
correct answers.
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Joe begins his reply:
\"I was just asking myself that the other day.\"
Getting back to the grammar page http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-2b.htm
concerning reflexive pronouns: this grammar section exists only
because of the way Joe answers the question. Course organization is
turned upside down to a certain extent. Spontaneous speech
determines what is covered in the exercises, not the \"author\".
At the same time, I attempt to grade and correlate these results of
spontaneous speech with EFL methods from the Big Publishers so that
Real English can always be used by a teacher as a complement to a
main method.
As you can see, my grammar pages are traditional, but with sound
files and the record/compare java applet for pronunciation.
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Next Exercise : What do you like to do for fun?
Link to Exercise 3: http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-3.htm
In the third part of his interview, Joe introduces us to a lot of
new vocabulary. What’s the best way to teach vocabulary
online?
I prefer to combine a traditional, but simplified dictionary type of
definition, along with pictures, and audio, as we see in this
exercise illustrating 6 of Joe’s vocabulary items.
Pictures are used in the videos and on the exercise pages in
order to convey meaning. This one is from the video:
Notice that the picture shows Joe doing what
he says he likes to do. This technique of
cutting out interviewee’s heads, and putting
them in relevant situations, is used in almost
all the lessons. (We met Joe on 57th St. in
NYC, not while hiking in the woods).
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Next Exercise : What do you like to do for fun? Link to Exercise 4:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-4.htmLesson 29, Exercise 4:
Finally, in this particular case, the picture in the video
helps define movies. I also added an audio file so that the
student can hear a love doing sentence without Joe’s
“mistake” or false start (I do, uh... I love…).
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Next Exercise : What do you like to do for fun? Link to Exercise 5:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/29/29-5.htm Lesson 29, Exercise 5:
In Joe’s final exercise, we define Joe’s favorite activity
i.e., \"sittin’ around with folks talking\" with pictures in both
the video and integrated into the exercise page, but we
also introduce the verb \"socialize\", and we define “folks\".
This HotPot exercise is also hybrid as we saw in Exercise 2. There
are 36 correct answers for what the student can type, including
socializing and sitting around talking, etc.
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Examples of Other Types of Exercises / Lessons 1/2
(in case we have more presentation time)
• An example of « French Bubbles »
http://www.real-english.com/reo/2/unit2.html
• An example of unusable speech, nevertheless used as an illustration:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/38/38-15.htm
• Grammar in context, example:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/37/37-1.htm
• Example of a contribution from an exercise maker:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/32/unit32.html (Birgit Ferran)
• Combo: my exercises with contributor exercise (Glenys Hanson)
http://www.real-english.com/reo/53/unit53.html
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Examples of Other Types of Exercises / Lessons 2/2
(in case we have more presentation time)
• One of many examples contrasting American and British usages:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/38/38-7.htm
• Multiple videos on 1 page:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/38/38-11.htm
and small videos for Drag & Drop:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/23/23-12.htm
• The \"old approach\": http://www.real-english.com/reo/7/7-1.htm
• Grammar Practice before watching video:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/19/19-1.htm
• Example of an advanced lesson:
http://www.real-english.com/reo/55/unit55.html
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The New Player - and a Real English Principle
Subtitles OFF
This is the complete “like to
do/like doing“ video at lesson
29 home.
After the student watches
the video without subtitles,
and after he does the
exercises, he is encouraged
to watch the entire video
with English subtitles before
watching the video in his
native language. 5 languages
are available for the
moment, and more are
coming.
I am using a new player from EnglishStar which you can see at most of my
Lesson home pages. I constantly suggest to students that they watch the
entire video many times WITHOUT subtitles before watching with
subtitles. I believe it improves pronunciation, especially if they watch and
listen to English only many times.
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PS:
the Problem of a Cool Domain Name
• Trademark as opposed to Copyright
• 3 court cases since 1994 (never lost a
court case but always expensive)
• Winning is loosing, especially
internationally
• And today \"Learn Real English\".
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Conclusions 1/2
• Spontaneous street speech defines the course
content and organization of Real English to a
large extent.
• Elements which help make the (apparently
difficult) videos accessible and useful include
the addition of explanatory pictures and
additional audio files. Multimedia is a necessity,
not an add-on.
• The record/compare applet enables students to
practice their pronunciation. We thereby cover
all 4 skills in our lessons: speaking, reading,
writing (keyboarding), and of course listening,
hopefully lots of listening before all else.
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Conclusions 2/2
• The exercise content of the Lessons are all ongoing
experiments. I can never be sure an exercise will work
until I see one of my students working on the exercises on
my computer.
• Strange as it seems, the \"beginner\" videos are often as
difficult as the \"upper intermediate\" videos due to the
nature of real English. Example: my so-called \"advanced
students\" often have problems with lesson 3 (spelling,
which follows the introduction to the alphabet), simply
because they have not spent enough time in English-
speaking countries, i.e., for lack of extended listening
practice, and often despite their good results in
international exams.
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