Short Form Content for Big Minds: Teaching Post- Millennials Phonetics Using YouTube Music Clips

Boredom, daydreaming, attention-getting, chatting, rebellion, fighting back, active resistance, cheating, self-defeating attitude. This is a short list of the recurrent symptoms tertiary post-millennial students communicate when exposed to canonical dry academic content. Students learning phonetics through the outmoded content-based approach have shown the same verbal /nonverbal behaviours. Edutainment and process-based learning are rarely used in Algerian schools. No wonder YouTube -as a short-form content provider- has become one of the most serious competitors of schools worldwide. A recorded experimental study, followed by a satisfactory scale, was used to assess the students’ performances and interests. The results showed higher scores of students using YouTube music clips as an edutaining process-based approach. A surprising list of nonverbal (micro) signs confirmed the hypothesis. Students from the experimental group as compared with the control group, asked for more lessons to better their comprehension of phonetics, a thing that we couldn’t predict. The potential practical implications of the following paper are multiple. The first one is what could be called the “pedagogisation” of entertaining tools like YouTube and their inclusion in schools to learn academic content. The second would be the identification of all the possible types of (micro) signs students would send when exposed to boring vs. interesting content or/and when applying a methodology to teach theoretical content as in the cases of phonetics, grammar, or even literature. Last but not least, the exploration of semiotic signs YouTube singers would send to the receivers i.e., students could be of paramount importance.