Intructions

Instructions for teachers:

Description of activity: 

This activity is designed for an ESL classroom

at the university level with intermediate to advanced

level students. This activity assumes that students 

already know how to use tools such as recording programs,

basic movie making programs, blogs, and internet.In this

activity students will work in pairs. Students will select 5

idioms and use their imagination to create a fictional

or real situation dialog with the idioms, record it

themselves, and make it as a video in slide show format

with transcripts. Teachers will evaluate students on 

their sentence structure, pronunciation, and grammar.

Steps:

Step 1: The teacher will first discuss idioms with students and share with them their experience with idioms, e.g., when they first hear an idiom, what they thought it means, what is the most interesting and useful idiom for them.

Step 2: Teacher will provide a list of idioms related to the topic of the lesson.

Step 3: The teacher will pair up the students, and each group will choose four or five idioms they like and make a dialogue.

Step 4:review the use of audacity and windows movie maker with students to digitize the dialogues.

Step 5: Provide student 2 or 3 days to complete the assessment.

Note: Students can record in the classroom ( Computer lab).

Instructions for students:

Step 1: The teacher will select students to work in pairs.

Step 2:Each group will pick from 4 to 5 idioms.

Step 3: Once the groups select the idioms, they will
write dialogues using the selected idioms. The dialogues 
can involve fiction or real situations.  Students may
change the selected idiom if they can’t find one that
matches a situation.

Step 4:  After students have written the dialogues they 
will need to record them using their own voices (for ex: using
audacity or other recording tool) and create a .mp3 or 
.wav file.  

Step 5: Create a video using windows movie maker using the
audio file and write the dialog using title slides (students do not need camera to make the video). Every slide should have preferably a black background and with white text to easily visualize the transcript of the story.Student may also add pictures in the introduction of each dialogue( Students can add a related picture).

Step 6: To complete the activity each group needs to upload the video in youtube.com, posted in the blog and share it in class.