Microlearning while watching movies in English. Is it possible?

First, let's look at the concept of microlearning. Basically, it's simple: you need to practice a skill – you break it down into smaller pieces and practice one piece at a time. Microlearning also means that a person doesn't study in the standard way, 45-60 minutes twice a week, but, for example, 10-15 minutes daily, which is more convenient for many adult students.

I'll take listening. In a lesson with a textbook, the teacher takes a standard audio, read by actors with a fairly slow, understandable speech. You go through several stages:

1. Pre-listening

This usually includes exercises on prediction:

• describe and analyze a picture that is related to the listening topic,

• answer a couple of questions on the topic,

• predict audio content by topic, keywords, audio part

There are quite a lot of such exercises, I have listed what I see most often.

2. Listening to a gist

Here, as a rule, you check whether your assumptions are correct or answer 1-3 questions on the main content.

3. Listening for detail

At this point, you listen to the audio again. Your goal is to hear more information. To check your understanding, you can:

• answer 5-7 questions on details in the text;

• decide whether the statements in the text are true or false;

• put the pictures in the correct order, etc.

Now calculate how much time you spent on all this. In my experience, it takes at least 40-50 minutes (though we usually also discuss ideas from the audio, express our point of view). And in the end?

Did you check your understanding of the text after such a set of exercises? Of course, yes. Did you improve your listening? Not quite. You understood what the text was about, you can retell it in general terms, you answered a bunch of questions about it.

Have you analyzed the speaker's speech? His accent? The way he connects words together? His intonation? Most likely not.

Even if you continue to work with vocabulary and grammar, these micro-skills will remain somewhere on the outskirts of learning, purely as a side effect.

No, I'm not saying that the scenario I just described doesn't have a right to exist – the skill of understanding in general and in detail is very important, otherwise, how are you going to communicate?

But when you leave the classroom and find yourself on the street with all the variety of connected speech, accents, elision, glottal stops, you risk getting lost in it all.

This is where microlearning using authentic videos comes into play. If you study, for example, 10-15 minutes daily, then in a week you will be able to:

• check your understanding of a piece of film or a short trailer;

• take key vocabulary from there and listen to it in the video;

• take the key grammar, listen to it and practice it;

• do listening exercises: insert words, choose the correct option from similar-sounding words (this is my favorite – no matter what your level, you will still come across something that you will have to listen to several times), decode phrases (that is, listen and write down what they say verbatim);

• work on your pronunciation using shadowing (you listen to a phrase and repeat after the speaker, trying to copy his pronunciation as much as possible).

To work on understanding fast speech, accents, you need to take authentic videos with native speakers, watch them several times, gradually complicating the tasks. If you want to do this on your own, then:

1. Take a piece of video for a maximum of 5 minutes;

2. Check your understanding (for this you can compare it with the version dubbed into Russian)

3. Listen to it again, writing down key words.

4. Do this several times until you have written the entire text from the video.

5. Check your text for grammar

6. Compare your text with the script

7. Listen to the video with the script, paying attention to how the speaker merges words, “swallows” unstressed syllables and whole words

8. Read the script after the speaker, copying his speed, manner of pronunciation, intonation

9. Record yourself, perhaps several times, until your speech sounds as similar as possible to the speaker's speech.

Do 1-2 of the suggested tasks per day (you don’t need to do it all in one go – you’ll get exhausted very quickly).

If you do this regularly, the effect will not take long to appear – it will be easier for you to understand others, since you will experience these features yourself.

If you are interested in working with authentic videos, films, but you still need help from a teacher (at least to get feedback on your shadowing or more detailed explanations, various exercises), then I invite you to my blog on Boosty. Right now I have a free week on the film Dune Part One. I'm just starting it, and I really need feedback, so I opened it until 22.07.

Here link