The British Council ran a contest last year called #EnglishEffect.

Here is how they describe it:

Last year the British Council ran a global video competition where people from all over the world sent in videos telling us what English meant to them. The winning video and the others are great for stimulating classroom discussion, and for ideas for making your own.

They are absolutely right about the videos being a good stimulus for class discussion. In many ways, it’s a great companion idea to having students do a “one-sentence project” (see The Best Resources For Doing A “One-Sentence Project”). There, students write a sentence about what they want people to say about them thirty/forty years in the future, and we videotape them.

With the #EnglishEffect, I’m planning on showing some of these videos to my students, and then have them create posters and a video explaining what they hope to gain by learning English. It will work particularly well following a lesson I do on health and financial benefits to being bilingual or multilingual.

Here’s the British Council’s winning entry, followed by an introductory video kicking-off a playlist of others from their contest. You can also see them all on YouTube here.