YouTube in EFL classes

Learning a foreign language is an interesting process and students always need motivation and encouragement during this period. Technology might be one of the factors which affects students’ attitude positively in the learning process. The use of technology brings lot of advantages into the classroom. Students may have a chance to see the real world in the classrooms and they can be motivated easily.
Of course, professional teachers want to take their students from the old and familiar to new and unfamiliar while improving their English language skills. YouTube remains a powerful classroom tool to achieve that goal.
Teachers use YouTube to have student’s research job interview tips, stress patterns, pronunciation problems, and informational interviews. The results have been consistently positive as they may have students write concise video reviews and email teachers some reviews for homework before the next class.
Then teacher can edit the reviews, watch the videos and add his own comments in blue ink, and combine the reviews into a single document that is emailed to all class members. Result: almost every student watches every video recommended and spending far more time on the topic than teacher can allocate in class. It’s both popular and quite effective.
In some classes, teachers use famous songs on YouTube as a listening exercise. Students listen to maybe 3 variations of these songs and discuss which is the easiest to understand, etc…nice for comparison and sometimes the students disagree with each other about which version they like best!
In the EFL classroom, YouTube can be used to provide a variety of learning experiences to students, including watching interview with an author or other native English speakers, or international projects with other classrooms.
The real advantages to this site - at least from a language learning point of view:
1) They offer authentic examples of everyday English used by everyday people;
2) Students are attracted to the "real life" nature of these videos;
3) By creating context (komments) for these short videos you can help your students explore a world of online English learning possibilities;
4) Improving of listening skills;
5) Videos provide EFL learners with real-life English. The English is spoken at normal speed and uses vocabulary and sentence structure that native English-speaking people employ;
6) Good YouTube videos are free to access, short in duration and therefore, much easier to plan into an EFL lesson.
Of course, this is the challenge as well. Students may enjoy watching these clips, but poor sound quality, pronunciation and slang can make these short videos even more difficult to understand.

There also exist Top 100 YouTube Videos for Teaching English –
http://ddeubel.edublogs.org/2010/05/06/top-100-youtube-videos-for-efl/