When teaching listening skills, our goal is to immerse students in authentic spoken texts, exposing them to native speakers' accents, intonation, expressions and so on. YouTube is an obvious source of such texts, offering a wealth of diverse content and abundant opportunities for listening skills development. However, there's a catch—videos are often quite lengthy, which hinders their use for focused learning.  Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use timestamps to pinpoint a specific video segment.

Begin by identifying the starting point of your segment of the video you wish to focus on with your students. Pause the video at the starting point.

Step 5: Go back to the original video and identify the timestamp for the end of you segment. Convert it to seconds. For example, if need an 8-seconds-long segment running from 1 min 01 sec to 1 min 08 sec, your end timestamp will be 68 sec.

Step 6: Return to the URL you generated in Step 4 and add the ending time using the command "&end=68", where 68 is your ending time in seconds.  In my example, the custom URL with look as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GszPDWy3o0s?si=T9XUGF8SGJSsf4by&start=61&end=68 

You now have a custom segment of the YouTube video, which will start and end at the specified times, that you can share with your students.

by Oxana Kolosova