On Sunday, Milada Krajewska and I were looking for the amazing playphrase.me, which Anthony Schmidt had introduced to me a couple of months ago and I’d forgotten the name of. It’s a kind of audio corpus, where you can search for a particular word or phrase and it will find a series of examples from films and TV shows. It’s designed for language learners, and you can also help them to add to their database of phrases. Here’s an example for ‘if you know what I mean‘:
In the process, we came across Yarn, another tool to find video clips by quote. The interface isn’t as good as playphrase, the clips aren’t always cut smoothly and you have to manually select the next clip. However, if you choose carefully, it could work well for dictations practising connected speech, especially because each video is on a loop until you stop it. Here’s the same phrase, ‘if you know what I mean‘, on Yarn:
What would you do with these two tools in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context they are used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)
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Comments on: "Finding video clips by phrase" (2)
hi Sandy
teachers may be wondering what are common spoken formulae that they could use with these tools, i add a note about this here https://plus.google.com/+MuraNava/posts/HL2Qf3SajQy
ta
mura
Thank you.
Of course it is a very useful element to add to the drilling of a new phrase. Once you introduce it. Very strong sensually because it is visual and make connections with familiar scenes and actors.
Esty Feldman