DVDs

3 Real English DVDs with books for classroom use.
These new DVDs are perhaps best described by Mark Ellison Taylor of the EFL WEB. Reproduced with his permission:

Hundreds of passers–by, tourists, businessmen and students on the streets of New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, London, Dublin, and a dozen other cities are all interviewed. The collection of responses is a most effective and entertaining tool for the classroom. Changing accents and the good humor of both interviewer and interviewee ensure that the sequences are always engaging. Teachers find Real English as entertaining as students .

US $999 (includes FREE SHIPPING!)	Call 1-800-320-2224 to order in the US. Outside of the US, contact mike-at-real-english.com

For each video there is a Video Workbook with exercises related to the sequences on video. All three books use illustrations to enhance the exercises. Transcripts of the videos and answer keys are also included at the back of each book.

An instructor's guidebook ensures that even beginner teachers will get the most out of the method by following the step-by-step classroom activity suggestions.
The instructions in the front of each book ask you to watch each sequence 2 or 3 times and then complete the corresponding exercise in the book. Each sequence contains several interviews. If you have problems understanding the sequences you are directed to watch the video again, pausing after each interview you have not understood.

Once completed, you can check your answers in the back of the book. To verify further that you have understood what has been said, you can follow the transcript to the video. In normal classroom environments, the transcripts are not read until they are understood using the listening comprehension techniques presented in the instructor's guidebook.

A problem with classroom-based teaching is the absence of variety. If students cannot understand the language outside the classroom because they have become so familiar with the accents of their own teacher, the course has failed. This series meets this requirement by bringing practice with real people from all over the globe to the classroom.

The videos are broken up with musical interludes, songs that lead nicely into each new sequence. The sequence number and title also appear on screen. This makes finding your place in the video easy if you plan to use parts of it over the course of a term.

Video 1 is 38 minutes long and contains 14 sequences. Video # 2, 34 minutes in length, containing 15 sequences. The 36-minute Video 3 contains 21 sequences.
To prevent these fast paced interviews from dulling the senses, humor is introduced.

For example, when the interviewer attempts to elicit a response from a vagrant holding a beer. My favorite sequence had the interviewer walk up to unsuspecting interviewees and ask 'What are you doing?' in the Doing Exercise of Video 2. The friendly tone is helped also by the often merry attitude of the interviewees themselves. Not an unhappy soul in the place. This makes all three videos attractive to watch.

The use of interviewees from several non-English speaking countries will help an EFL student to identify with them.

Usefully they come in VHS Pal, Secam and NTSC. So wherever you are in the world, there is a version just for you. Real English videos are, without question, extremely useful resources for any ESL teacher's bag of tricks.

Editor's note: the 3 videocassettes were transformed into 3 DVDs, providing extreme flexibility of use. Repetition is essential in any ESL course. The standard DVD "repeat this sequence only" button, for example, is an ESL teacher's dream.