Engage EFL students with Powerpoint
Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) can be challenging, especially when your students have little grasp of the language. You may find it hard to communicate with them, motivate them, and assess their progress.
One of the common problems that EFL teachers face is student engagement. How can you make your lessons more interesting and interactive for your learners? How can you help them develop their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in English? One possible solution is to use PowerPoint with live captions. In this blog post, I will explain what live captions are, how they can benefit EFL students, and how you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations.
This is a really easy one to set up but requires a little bit of extra hardware to be in place first (a mic is essential), therefore I’m classing it as a Level 2 on the IPI scale (click to find out more)!
What are live captions?
Live captions are a feature in PowerPoint that allows you to display subtitles or captions for your speech in real time. You can choose from over 60 languages and dialects, and customize the font size, color, and position of the captions. Live captions can help you make your presentations more accessible, inclusive, and engaging for your audience, especially for EFL students who may have difficulty understanding your speech or following along with your slides. Live captions are also available in Stream, Teams and are available in OneNote from device to device (more progress on that coming soon).
Hardware
A Surface Pro or equivalent is a good option. You can cast to most projectors by purchasing a wireless display adaptor like the one below and connecting it to the back of your projector. The built in mic will pick up your spoken words in English and translate them via live captions to your screen. Some interactive white boards will NOT require a wireless display adapter, they have miracast software built in and many schools are already use this method of casting very effectively. If you are unsure whether your board has this built in, reach out to your school IT tech or in NI your c2k locality team.
Alternatively, a webcam connected to you desktop computer will also suffice. The mic should automatically pick up when you turn on subtitles. The main disadvantage is mobility. You will not be able to walk around the room like you can with a Surface Pro.
How can live captions benefit EFL students?
Live captions can provide several benefits for EFL students, such as:
- Enhancing comprehension: Live captions can help EFL students understand your speech better by providing them with written support. They can also help them learn new vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation by seeing how you use them in context.
- Improving retention: Live captions can help EFL students remember your key points better by reinforcing your verbal messages with visual cues.
- Increasing engagement: Live captions can help EFL students stay focused and interested in your presentation by creating a more interactive learning experience. They can also help them participate more actively by asking questions, making comments, or giving feedback based on the captions.
How can you use live captions in your PowerPoint presentations?
To use live captions in your PowerPoint presentations, you need to have a microphone and an internet connection. If you have a Surface Pro or similar you need to have it hooked up to your interactive whiteboard or cast it to a digital screen.
Web Version
You also need to enable the feature in your PowerPoint settings. Here are the steps to do so for the web based version of PowerPoint.
- Go to the web version of 365. Open PowerPoint then open your presentation and go to the Slide Show tab.
- Click on the Subtitle Settings icon and select Spoken Language. Choose the language that you will speak in your presentation.
- Click on the Subtitle Settings icon again and select Subtitle Language. Choose the language that you want to display for the captions.
- Click on the Start Subtitles button to begin the live captions. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+C to start or stop the captions.
- Speak clearly and at a normal pace into your microphone. The captions will appear on the screen as you speak. You can also pause, resume, or end the captions at any time.
The video below shows you how this is done in real time – it’s pretty quick and easy!
Desktop Version
The process is similar for the desk top version of PowerPoint. However, you have the added bonus of being able to adjust the Subtitle Settings such as the font size and colour, background colour and position. You can see how to do that in the video below.
Summary
To conclude, live captions are a great tool to enhance the listening and comprehension skills of EFL pupils. They can make a teacher/speaker easier to understand, and help the students learn new words and spellings. Live captions are free, easy to set up and particularly useful for classroom treaching, assemblies and visiting speakers.
To use live captions effectively, speak clearly, avoid jargon or complex language, and adapt the pace of your speech to support comprehension.
However, they are not perfect, and they can sometimes cause a bit of a distraction. You can only translate captions for one language at a time and may need to mix things up a bit if you have several different languages spoken by various EFL students. There is also no live caption filter in PowerPoint, so watch out for any potential mispronounciation issues! However, PowerPoint Live may address these issues – for another blog I think. EFL students with literacy difficulties or memory processing difficulties might also struggle somewhat with captions.
I hope you found this blog post useful, and I encourage you to try live captions with your EFL students. Let me know what you think in the comments below, and stay tuned for more edtech tips and tricks. Thank you for reading!
Further information
Video: Live captions & subtitles – Microsoft Support
Using Subtitles and Captioning in PowerPoint (slidemodel.com)