Online Videos for Specific Purposes

Abstract

Many EFL/ESL college students, enrolled in colleges and universities that use English as a medium of instruction have difficulty understanding lectures in specialized courses delivered in English such as engineering, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, biology, biochemistry, anatomy, physiology and others. To help students improve their listening comprehension skills, develop their repertoire of specialized technical terms and fill the gaps in their background knowledge, class lectures can be supplemented by specialized online videos. This paper aims to show the advantages of integrating specialized online videos, give samples of websites where specialized online videos can be downloaded, describe the criteria for selecting specialized online videos, outline the skills that can be developed through supplementary specialized online videos, and present a scheme for phases of teaching and learning with specialized online videos. It concludes with some recommendations for creating a specialized online video repository.

Keywords: Online Videos, ESP, EFL Students, College Students, Listening Skills, Technical Terms, Specialized Lectures