Shot from YouTube video about ESLExtrasCan video offer a quick introduction when you can’t get to an ESL bookstore? I often get questions from teachers and volunteer tutors about the ESL Extras readers:

  • I’m nowhere near a bookshop – what do the books look like? How do you use them?
  • What are the levels, exactly? What’s this ‘Beginner B’?
  • How does your prelim ‘literacy’ reader work?

I have blogged about these questions, but I know that for some people, video offers way more value than reading*: hence this experiment with YouTube.

This video introduces the ESL Extras series:

This looks at levels for the different ESL Extras books:

And this one explains how Welcome to Hope Street, the prelim/literacy reader, works:

The video learning curve

It was an interesting process making these videos (big shoutout thanks to Steve Bezant, husband of a writing friend, who was behind the camera and did the editing). I’ve been wanting to make videos for students as well, but wondered how it would go, and now I realise how different video presenting is from chatting away in class, where you have non-stop interaction.

So as an experiment, it’s been useful for me, even before I get feedback from teachers. (I think there’s still quite a lot of refining to do.) If you’re planning to do some ‘talking head’ presenting, Steve recommended a free Udemy course called ‘How to create great talking head videos’ – I worked through this and it was very helpful.

Feedback is welcome…

So feedback is welcome – as are other questions about ‘the books and how to use them’ that aren’t answered on this site, or which need visuals to be answered clearly. Thanks for watching!

*For those who can’t think of anything worse than watching videos when they could be reading, please refer to the blog posts about ESL Extras levels, and Welcome to Hope Street .