English Central | YouTube for English Teaching | Videos for ESL

Do you like to use videos in your classes, but have a difficult time finding the one on YouTube that is at the right level for your students? Then search no more! Just use English central which has a ton of ESL videos for beginners along with more advanced levels of students.

Keep on reading to find out more about this valuable teaching resource for ESL classes videos.

English Central: Videos for English Teaching!

Kids as well as adults love videos and they make excellent language teaching tools. The only problem is that many of the videos on YouTube are too difficult, especially for beginners.

However, there is a good option! English Central which is full of ESL conversation videos.  You can search by level and find just about anything you could possibly want. Keep reading for how I use English Central in my own ESL classes in South Korea.

Videos for ESL Students Activity

Skills: Listening/ Speaking
Time: 10-15 minutes
Level: Beginner to Advanced
Materials Required: Internet connection

English Central is YouTube for language learners. There is premium content and functionality, but you can enjoy many features for free. YouTube has subtitles on some videos, but English Central takes it to the next level. Check them out here.

The videos have been curated and organized by level, topic, and/ or language skill and each video is segmented for easy replay of a chunk of speech. Students can also click on a single word to hear it pronounced slowly and clearly.

One activity you can use English Central for is pronunciation. Have your student listen to a clip and repeat. The videos for young learners are fairly simple, with slow, and clear speech. You can pause after each phrase or sentence and repeat as needed.

Begin by playing the entire clip from ELS Englishcentral once or twice. Then, replay the clip bit by bit for the student to repeat. Each clip is a short story, so you can also watch and discuss and/or summarize a clip as a 120-90-60 fluency activity.

Or, you could have students watch a video and try to pick out all the examples of a certain grammar point. For example, subject and object pronouns or indefinite pronouns (see our top indefinite pronouns games here).

Procedure for Using English Central Videos:

1. Make sure you will have an internet connection during your class.
2. Select a video in advance or let your student choose one. There are “courses” which are sets of related videos, which you can work through in a series.
3. Give students a pre-listening task of some kind.
4. Play the entire clip.
5. Have students discuss with a partner their response to the pre-listening task. Check together with the entire class.
6. Give a more difficult listening task and watch the video the second time.
7. Have students discuss with a partner their answers and check together as a class.
8. Play one segment (sentence or phrase) at a time and have the student repeat, trying to copy the pronunciation.
9. End by watching the entire clip one more time and discussing and/or summarizing.

ESL Video Clip Listening Task Ideas

Giving students a reason to listen to any ESL video clip is key to getting then to listen well! Here are some of the listening tasks that you might consider assigning your students:

• Listening for a specific grammar point
• Finding specific vocabulary
• Answering simple true/false questions
• Answering more detailed questions
• Making a prediction and then seeing if the prediction is true
• Pause the video clip and have students predict what comes next
• Describe the steps if someone is doing something like cooking
• Show two ESL video clips with opposing viewpoints and have students discuss which one was more well thought-out
• Create a storyboard based on the video

Are there Any YouTube ESL Lessons that You Recommend?

Okay, so if you’ve checked out English Central but didn’t really find something that you liked, Are there YouTube ESL channels that are particularly good?

As a teacher, you can check out videos made for teachers by teachers. However, if you want to use a video in class to show your students, then your best bet will be videos made for English language learners. You should be able to find on any topic, grammar point or vocabulary set.

Here are some of my top picks for YouTube ESL Lessons.

Other Sources for ESL Videos

If you’re looking for some other resources for videos for ESL learners besides YouTube and English Central, here are a few more recommendations:

ESL Video

English Club

Film English

Like these ESL Class Video Recommendations? 

It’s from the book, 39 Awesome 1-1 ESL Activities: For Kids (7-13). There are 38 more fun, engaging and interesting ESL activities for private classes with kids. The key to better private language teaching classes is a wide variety of activities and this book will help you get there in style! Don’t worry.

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Have your Say about English Central Videos for ESL Learners

What are your thoughts about using English Central in your classes? Is EnglishCentral better than YouTube, or not so much? Do you have another source for TEFL videos that you’d like to share? Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts.  We’d love to hear from you.

Also be sure to give this article a share on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. It’ll help other busy teachers, like yourself find this useful resource.