26 | The SpinTX video archive provides access to selected video clips and transcripts from the Spanish in Texas Corpus, a collection of video interviews with bilingual Spanish speakers in Texas. These videos were collected by students at the University of Texas at Austin who visited their home communities and interviewed native speakers of Spanish in those communities. This method of gathering videos has allowed for very engaging videos that let viewers see real Spanish speakers talking about their real lives in as natural a manner as possible. The videos of these interviews were reviewed for especially interesting / useful short segments, and these segments were exported for use in the SpinTX video archive. Using SpinTX, you can search and tag the videos for features that match your interests, and create and share your favorite playlists. You can search for videos based on the topic of the video (e.g. friends, family, Texas, etc.), languages features present in the video (e.g. auxiliary verbs, suggestions, discourse markers, etc.), and/or by speakers and their characteristics (e.g. gender, age, where born, etc.) The website also includes Lesson Ideas from educators who are currently using SpinTX and the option to submit your own Lesson Ideas so other educators can use them. You can search for lesson ideas based on the specific skills they target, the communicative mode, the type of learner, the setting, how long you have, and how long you have to prepare for the class. Another feature of SpinTX is that when viewing the videos, you can choose to have the transcripts displayed or not displayed, in addition to having the captions displayed or not displayed. And, if the transcripts are displayed, you have the option to white out specific grammar, vocabulary, and/or pragmatic elements contained within the transcript of that particular video. Thus, you can quickly and easily create a cloze activity right on the website with just a couple clicks of a button. Personally, I use the SpinTX video archive in my upper-level grammar and linguistics undergraduate courses on a regular basis. I search for videos that illustrate the grammar or linguistic feature that we are discussing that day, and then have students discuss how the video illustrates the particular feature we are discussing. My students enjoy being able to watch these engaging videos and seeing the grammar and linguistic features we are discussing being used by real speakers in naturalistic conversations. They even start to feel like they know some of the speakers, and will react when they see a speaker’s video pop up with whom they are already familiar. |
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