Using EdPuzzle: An Interview with David Beckham

One of the learning objectives of my course is that students understand interviews with celebrities and can also make interviews themselves. Also, they must be able to talk about family and technologies to obtain a B2 certificate. As it usually happens, the ones in the textbook and in other assessment materials available are scripted and fake, performed by actors. 

In this case, I’ve created an activity with a real Youtube video that I found really funny and that can be generally understood using Top-down strategies because it features a person most of my students know and who some admire because of his career in football and some others like because he is very good-looking and nice. Furthermore, it deals with a very common topic (relationships between parents and children) which works well in a group in which I have students of all ages from 16 to 60.

I have designed a flipped-classroom activity in which, in class, students gather some knowledge they already have for general understanding (pre-listening activity). Then, I split the video they have to watch at home into chunks followed by a comprehension question to look for specific information (during listening activity) and after that I designed an open question to think further about the matter(post-listening activity) and come prepared to speak about it in class.

The advantage of this activity is that we can spend time in class doing other activities that require face-to-face interaction because there is a holiday coming up and some extra-curricular activities, which means I have to re-arrange my planning. In addition to this, it features realia, which is highly motivating and exposes students to real language. On the other hand, some students never do homework due to lack of time or simply because they don’t feel like doing it, which hinders the development of the post-listening activity in class. In order to make them use it I should have told them that watching the video would add up to their final listening mark.

Step	Place	Development	Grouping
1 Pre-listening	Class	Open questions: Who is David Beckham? Where is he from? What do you know about him? What do you know about his family?	Whole group
2 During listening	Home	Watch video and answer quiz questions.	Individual
3 Post-listening	Home	Think about some aspects related to the video.	Individual
4 Post-listening	Next class	Debate: Should parents control their children’s social networks? How difficult is it to deal with a teenager? How can online fame affect a teenager’s development? How would you feel if you were Brooklyn Beckham and father was more famous than you?	Small groups (4 students)

You will find the video here.