No Good Videos to Use in Your L2 Classroom? Make Your Own with Stupeflix!

Various means of multimedia and entertainment, such as film, music, online digital photography and so on are, in my opinion, well underrated in terms of their potential in augmenting L2 education as a whole and are thus under-utilized. Surely upon consideration, nearly any L2 educator can see the value that foreign language media and art can have as part of an immersion in L2 language and culture. So it follows that if a student can not in fact be physically immersed in an L2 environment, then certainly a kind of "sensory immersion" would be the next-best thing.

This is not to say that the arts, again meaning to include film and music, are not already frequently used in foreign language and second language classrooms; indeed, they are, though maybe not as much or in ways that they should. In addition, maybe you can't find enough of them that are "just right" for your usage, you'd like to do more with multimedia. Now the internet and its seemingly endless supply of applications and websites, provide students and educators with an opportunity to experience and create these modes of L2 inputs (and outputs, as it relates to the creation of multimedia discussed below) via the "cloud" from anywhere at anytime with a computer and an internet connection.

Of course viewing and listening to foreign language films and music, respectively, on the web or at home is not a new possibility. But the capability to use these art forms to put SLA into practice using written and orally-based L2 compositions to produce a personal audio-visual presentation (without the need to purchase editing software at exorbitant costs) is a relatively new advent.

An example of, but certainly not the only, web-based application / website for user-created multimedia productions is Stupeflix.

Stupeflix allows users, aftera short registration process (or a convenient option to log-in with one's Facebook or Google accounts), to upload personal photos or downloaded images (appropriately licensed ones, that is!) and join them with site-supplied video-esque backdrops and transitions to liven up a typical slideshow to a more feature-like exhibition. Allowing the addition of captions to tell the story and backing music from your own audio files, you are left with the potential for fun-to-produce, fun-to-watch, and even fun-to-grade L2 assignments. Below is a silly Stupeflix production I created based on a vacation I took a few years ago. While watching it, imagine that this type of presentation was elicited from a non-native speaker of English as part of a skills task...





So how do you turn something apparently goofy like this into an assessable exercise? Simply supply your students with a language-learning objective, be it proper usage of verb tenses, syntactical features, pronoun selection, newly introduced lexicon, or the appropriate location of negatory clauses. In fact, the options here are as endless as they would be for any standard writing assignment. Then, ask your students to tell a story with their own images (I prefer the usage of personal photos, as they are more expressive) while following those linguisitc features being assessed. Now you have a fun (possibly even fun-ny), engaging task what will be entertaining for the creator/student, his or her peers, and you, the instructor.


A key to successful and consistent SLA is prolonged interest and attention from the student. A "changing-up" of the methods and  means of working with the TL is critical to this. In addition, an aresenal of varying forms of input and output exercises provide greater contextual expanse and depth for linguistic interaction, helping to bettew attain L2 proficiency. Stupeflix, and its numerous counterparts, are excellent for fulfilling these roles.