Russell Stannard investigates interviews on the internet.
www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/
I have been having a lot of fun with this section of the BBC site recently. It has a collection of interviews, originally produced for radio, with people as diverse as Bob Marley and Sir Alf Ramsey (manager of the victorious England football squad, captained by Bobby Moore, in the 1966 World Cup). Many of the interviews are based around facets of British culture. (I had a lot of fun explaining to my students who Bobby Moore was and why he is still so important to British people!) They are organised alphabetically on the site and some are broken up into digestible chunks, while others are very long and a little hard to work with. The only sad thing is that there are no transcripts. If you want to use these interviews with students, you will have to be selective, but there are quite a few gems amongst them. There is even an interview with Chomsky, which you may want to listen to for your own enjoyment. There is also other information that you can access about the personalities involved, normally a short biography of the interviewee, which can be useful for introducing the topic to the students. Sometimes there are links to other relevant parts of the BBC website. Obviously the level of the material is generally quite high, but the interviews which are broken up into sections are quite easy to work with and some of the speakers are particularly clear. One of the most easy to understand is film director Alfred Hitchcock, and I should like to make some suggestions for using his interview in the classroom as a demonstration of the sort of things one can do with this material. These activities are suitable for an upper-intermediate class.
www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/ profilepages/hitchcocka1.shtml
- Ask the students if they know who Alfred Hitchcock was. Put some ideas up on the board.
- Give them a copy of the information provided on the site about Alfred Hitchcock. This is quite long so ask them to scan through it and finish off the following sentences which you can write on the board: Alfred Hitchcock was born in ………………………………………… In 1925 he directed his first film, which was called …………………………………………………………………………. He moved to the USA in ……………………………………………….. His first Hollywood film was ………………………………………….. Dial M for Murder was made in ……………………………………… In 1960 he made a film called ……………………………………….. He made his last film in …………………………………………………
- Next, put the students into groups of four or five around a computer. Tell them to go to the webpage with the interview with Alfred Hitchcock and to listen to the extract called ‘His private life, his clothes and after-dinner speaking’.
- Then give the students the following very simple worksheet with a series of True and False sentences to complete. All them to listen to the interview as much as they want so that they have control (it’s a good idea to put one student in charge of each computer).
- Finally, ask the students to write a short description of Alfred Hitchcock’s character based on what they have heard. You could brainstorm some ideas first, such as organised, simple, modest, etc. Try asking the students to sum him up in about five or six sentences and then get some of the students to read out their texts.
This interview is difficult in parts and my students found the last part challenging to follow, but they could answer most of the questions and there was lots of playing and replaying of the listening. The students were listening attentively for well over ten minutes. This activity worked well for me. Taking into consideration the slight problem we had with the end of the interview, I think that if I did it again, I would tell the students to stop when the interviewer asks about Hitchcock’s practical jokes and leave the last part out of the activity. The first part of the interview is very clear, however, and provides quite enough material to work with.
Some of the other interviews I have used include those with Bobby Moore and Margaret Thatcher (you have to be selective, but the section about her childhood is good to work with). I had a lot of success with the Roald Dahl interview, though I did use it in a higher level class. Remember: the vital thing is the tasks you set, not the level of the interview itself. I am beginning to find other sites with more contemporary interviews, but I have yet to find a site that has them organised so well.
Russell Stannard is a senior lecturer in ICT and course leader for MSc Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He has an extensive publishing background in ELT and is currently working with BBC Worldwide on various CD-ROMs, and with Macmillan Hong Kong on a primary course. He also teaches English and Spanish at Sutton Adult Education College, UK.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 42, 2006
