YouTube for learning English as a foreign language : critical thinking, communicative skills

Abstract

The selection of available videos on YouTube comes up as a meaningful way to foreign language learning. The approach has been adopted in a high school, engaging 11th grade students (16/17 years old) in formal and non-formal learning environments. Our World; Teen Consumers; The World of Work and the Multicultural World were the curriculum themes covered by the current experience. The first author, an English teacher, is doing her master’s dissertation based on a case study [1] [2], which focuses on the impact of YouTube on promoting essential competences to the English language learning process. A formal research dimension is now added to this framework based on the teacher’s own practices until the moment. In this paper we present; a) theories that support the integration of YouTube for learning English as a second language; b) approaches and specific materials centred on the students and used in the classroom context, illustrating some examples; c) the study design and the techniques to collect and analyse data; d) the value added by the component of investigation to school teaching practice.