Learning Beyond the Classroom: Creating Videos and Workbooks Around Local Places for EAL Learners

By Elnaz (Ellie) Zamanzade

Last year, I worked with a teacher candidate to develop a video and workbook around the UBC Okanagan pond for English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners. A year later, I worked on another video-and-workbook project, this time focusing on Chaibaba, a local tea business. The two projects are quite different, but both grew from the same idea: language learning does not always have to begin and end in the classroom. Local places, people, and stories can give students something real to listen to, talk about, and connect with.

Starting with the Local Environment

For the first project, we chose the UBC Okanagan pond as a way to bring ecology and language learning together. A Tour of the UBCO Pond was created for upper-intermediate EAL learners in a post-secondary listening and speaking course. It combined language learning with ecology, land stewardship, and observation of the natural environment.

The workbook starts with questions that give students a chance to connect the topic to their own experiences. They talk about plants from their home countries, plants used in cooking or medicine, and the role plants may have in their families or communities. From there, they build vocabulary related to biodiversity, ecosystems, drought, pollination, preservation, restoration, and native and invasive species.

We also wanted students to learn about local Indigenous connections to the land. One activity asks them to reflect on the idea of the land being “borrowed from the future” and what that might mean for our responsibilities to future generations. Another feature of the resource was including Syilx names for native plants where we could. This gave students a chance to encounter more than the English names of the plants they were learning about and to become more familiar with the place where they were studying.

The main part of the workbook is designed to take students outside to explore the pond after watching the video or listening to the audio. They identify species, decide whether they are native or introduced, and record what they notice. Students are also asked to download a plant-identification app that they can use while exploring the pond to help identify different species and learn more about whether they are native to the area or have been introduced. There is also a sensory grounding activity that asks them to stop for a moment and pay attention to what they can hear, smell, see, and feel.

I later used the resource in an interactive workshop with EAL students. We first watched the video together and then went outside to the pond. Students worked in small groups with a handout listing different species they had learned about. They walked around the pond looking for those species and recorded their observations about what they found. For me, this was one of the most interesting parts of the project because students were using the language and ideas from the video while actually exploring the place they had been learning about. It made the connection between language learning and the local environment much more concrete.

That experience stayed with me and became an important starting point for my second project.


Ellie, examining the species around the UBCO Pond

Moving into the Local Community

For the second project, I chose Chaibaba, a local tea business I had visited before. Being familiar with the business made me curious about the story behind it, but I also liked the possibilities it offered for language learning. I did not want to create a typical café lesson focused mainly on ordering a drink. A small local business could open up conversations about entrepreneurship, sustainability, community, and the challenges involved in keeping a business running.

Tea was also an interesting starting point because many students may already have their own experiences and traditions around it. The way tea is prepared, served, and shared can be very different from one place or family to another. It might be connected to hospitality, social gatherings, family traditions, or simply an everyday routine. That gave students something familiar to start with while they were also learning about a local business in their new community.

The Chaibaba video looks at what it is like to run a small business, some of the challenges that come with it, and the importance of community and sustainability. Instead of listening to dialogue written for a textbook, students hear people connected to the business speaking naturally about their experiences.

The workbook helps prepare students for that listening. It introduces tea-related vocabulary and objects such as an infuser, loose-leaf tea, a kettle, a teapot, and a saucer, as well as words from the interview such as ritual, sustainable, pivot, and steep.

Before watching, students think about what might make Chaibaba different from a regular café and what challenges a small local business might face. During the video, they take notes, and afterwards they work with questions about the owner’s experience, the challenges of running the business, and the advice she gives to people who may want to start one of their own.

Some activities go further than comprehension. Students discuss why sustainability and community connections might matter for a local business and compare tea and coffee traditions from their own cultures. They can talk about how drinks are prepared, when they are served, and what they might offer to family members, friends, or guests.

The final activities give students a chance to take some of these ideas further. One option asks them to create their own business, including its name, branding, and target customers, and then present it to a group. Another asks them to find a local business and conduct a short interview with an owner, manager, or employee. I liked the idea that the workbook could eventually lead students outside the resource itself and encourage them to learn more about the community around them.

Inside Chaibaba, a local teashop in Kelowna

Making the Resources Work in Different Settings

One thing I learned from both projects was that creating a resource around a real place also means thinking about when, where, and how students will actually be able to use it.

The pond video was recorded in June, which made it possible to capture the species featured in the resource in their natural surroundings. Classes using the resource at other times of the year might not be able to go outside, or students might not be able to find the same species depending on the season. Because of that, we also included photos of each species so students could still see what they looked like even if they were not visible around the pond. We also created an audio version that could be used when an outdoor visit was not possible. These options made the resource easier to use across different seasons and classroom settings.

The Chaibaba project brought a different challenge. A real interview gives you much more material than you can fit into an educational video. There were many interesting stories and comments that I would have liked to keep, but including everything would have made the video too long for classroom use.

Shortening it was not simply a matter of cutting sections. I wanted the conversation to remain natural and the story of the business to still make sense. Cutting too much could make the interview feel choppy, while keeping too much could make it difficult for students to follow. I used Camtasia to edit the video. It is available at no cost to UBC students, faculty, and staff, and I found its timeline-based editing tools straightforward for cutting and arranging the different parts of the interview.

What I Learned from the Two Projects

Working on the pond project gave me the confidence to take on the Chaibaba project more independently. It also showed me how much more engaging language learning can be when it is connected to something students can actually see, visit, or experience.

In both projects, the setting became part of the learning. At the pond, students encounter plants while thinking about ecology, land, and stewardship. With Chaibaba, they hear about tea, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and relationships within a local community.

The projects also changed the way I think about authentic materials. We often think of authentic listening materials as something we need to find: a news clip, a television program, a podcast, or a website. But teachers can also create them from what is already around them. A pond, a café, a community organization, a market, or another local place can become the starting point for listening, speaking, vocabulary, and discussion.

Creating these resources takes a lot of time. There is research, planning, filming, editing, activity design, and plenty of decisions about what to keep, what to change, and how students will actually use the material. But for me, one of the most rewarding parts is that the finished resource can introduce students to a place or story that they might otherwise have passed by without knowing much about it.

Explore the Resources

Both projects can be found in the Level IV Ecology and Business sections of UBC Okanagan’s English as an Additional Language Open Educational Resources: 
https://education.ok.ubc.ca/research-partnerships/english-as-an-additional-language/eal-oer/
 

Elnaz (Ellie) Zamanzade is pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC Okanagan’s School of Education. She has worked as a graduate teaching assistant in UBC Okanagan’s English Foundation Program and has supported EAL students through different teaching and learning activities. Her interests include post-secondary EAL teaching and learning, multilingual student experiences, and language education in higher education.