Last year, thanks to FLTC generosity, I received a mini-grant to make “Let’s Learn Polish”, a series of 30 well-produced and entertaining videos showing the daily life of a Polish family, their problems and joys, as well as Polish traditions, available to students on the FLTC server.

In the fall of 2008 I incorporated five of these lessons into POL 2010 as a part of homework assignment in which students were asked to watch the lessons and complete the corresponding on-line quizzes. I linked the videos to the courseBB site where I

also created a quiz with a set of multiple-choice type questions for each of the lessons.

Students were able to watch the videos as many times as they wanted to, but could take each quiz only once and the scores were automatically entered into the students’ on-line grade books. As the videos I chose were co-related with the material covered in POL 2010, only in two cases did I feel that the students needed some preparatory in-class exercises before tackling the assignments. These exercises introduced vocabulary and grammatical structures present in the videos but unfamiliar to the students.

Listening and comprehension exercises can take a lot of class time, as the students’ abilities to hear and understand vary greatly, and assigning some of these exercises as homework makes a lot of pedagogical sense. The scores my students received depended first of all on the amount of time they were willing to spend on the task, and less on their knowledge of Polish. For example, scores of some heritage speakers were sometimes lower than the scores of students at a lower language proficiency level, who often received perfect scores. They were capable of doing so well, as they watched some of the videos many times (as they told me), until they were certain that they heard and “got” the appropriate segments of the dialog, and only then they answered the questions.

Overall, the amount of the time the students spent on these listening comprehension exercises could probably not have been allocated to this type of exercise during the regular class meetings. The time varied greatly from learner to learner, which again would have been difficult to accommodate in class. In the process students not only improved their language skills, but they also gained confidence in their abilities to understand the spoken language, which is an empowering experience for any foreign language learner. Incidentally, they received higher grades for the course too!

Having the videos on the server and linked to the course BB site, available to students at any time, made a huge difference and contributed greatly to the students’ success (as almost all of the students completed all of the assignments).