Why use video in the language classroom?

From a pedagogic perspective…. all forms of video can allow us to illustrate and focus upon visual elements of life and communication. We can draw attention to non-verbal aspects of communication, focus on authentic language, make cross cultural comparisons and provide good quality listening practice. There is no doubt that engaging with video for language learning is a worthwhile activity.

(Video as a Learning Resource for Language Teaching by Teresa MacKinnon)

In a comment in the first post of this blog I mentioned that using video was one of the areas I particularly wanted to develop in my teaching because it’s something I have seldom used or know little about.  So I approached this subject with both interest and trepidation.

In a previous post on visuals in language learning, multi-modality was discussed and Walker and White (2013: p84) stated that “speaking, writing, images, and movement, (are modes) which give learners the opportunity to understand and combine information represented in different ways.”  They go on to discuss how computer technology, with reference to video, enables teachers and students to access and combine the modes of image, text and sound in a flexible non-linear way.

It is now common-place to use communication technologies in everyday life which are multimodal in nature.  It could be argued that they have perhaps become something that learners expect now to find in the classroom. In fact, Carrington and Robinson (2010) cited in Walker and White (2013), note the reported changes in language use that new technology brings about.  They suggest that this trend should be reflected in the  L2 classroom where digital and print literacies should co-exist. Walker and White develop this further by considering what it means to be ‘literate’ and predicting that our definition of this will continue to evolve.  It will  no longer be restricted to text literacy (reading and writing) but expand to include digital and visual literacy.

Keddie, J. (2014,) is more specific in providing reasons for the use of video in the language classroom, highlighting 6 main benefits briefly summarised here:

• it provides plentiful spoken language input that is authentic and varied in pronunciation, grammar and interaction patterns
• it provides language output opportunities by stimulating discussion, provoking opinion, and providing the platform for a range of  pedagogic tasks such as retelling, information exchange, guessing what happens next and so on
• it provides introductory or extended content on topics or themes already being studied
• it provides skills development opportunities, particularly in listening and speaking, but also could facilitate reading skills (by looking at trailers and comments) or writing skills in post viewing activities. He also mentions critical thinking and visual literacy skill.
• it provides models for different kinds of activities, most notably that of student created videos
• it provide motivation and engagement for learners.  

Keddie has developed a particular use of video in the classroom to exploit short video clips and calls it ‘videotelling’.  He has developed a website where he offers these for use with some explanation on how to use them. Here is how one teacher used a video, leaving these comments on the website:

I show the first minute or so and then ask my students to predict what is going to happen or what’s going to be said or done next; I make them listen to the whole video and afterwards they have to tell me in their own words what they have understood. I make them write what they have seen (activity which reveals a lot about my students’ manipulation of grammar), I ask my students to imagine how they would make a short video with the same objective. I ask my students to describe some of the things they see so as to revise that vocabulary.

Much of the above is primarily concerned with the exploitation of video in ELT, but Goldstein and Driver place equal emphasis on video creation saying that ” The primary goals (for doing so) are stimulating language through practical engagement in the creation of digital artefact,” This they say, is “achieved through the process of guided reflection, critical thinking, performance, debate, design, creativity and other competences often referred to as 21st-century skill.” (Goldstein, B and Driver, P. 2014, p117).  (Though not in a L2 learning context or specific to video, writing this blog for this module with all its associated tasks is an ideal example of processual guided learning that fosters these very skills!)

The pedagogic underpinning for video creation shares its roots with the interactional school of thought in methodology where the output is the vehicle for meaning making. “The world becomes intelligible to us as we build and negotiate experience in conjunction with others or with cultural artefacts.”(Goldstein, B and Driver, P. 2014, p118).

How can we use it well to support learning?

Using video in the language classroom requires the same evaluative and principled approach as using any other language activity. Therefore, when planning to use it, we need to consider how to maximise its effectiveness from this point of view. Some key elements to bear in mind when exploiting video, that have cropped up throughout the literature and in online guides, are outlined below:

Choose short clips. These avoid cognitive overload –’how to’ videos, trailers, adverts for example are good options, but there is no need to be restricted to these. I found the YouTube filter for length of video very useful when browsing for content.   Short clips says McKinnon, (from the article quoted above) maximise exploitation and impact – longer ones should be avoided as learners can become passive.

Think about the key focus or learning point for students.  Direct them to the features of the video you have identified. Taking the same approach as with authentic listening and reading where it would be wrong to try to cove all of the language. Being selective in the lexical or grammar item is just as important with video.

Think about where the video should be in order of lesson tasks. The lesson should have stages just as any other lesson would have. Prepare using pre-video activities to warm up and initially leave out the subtitles or captions to explore gist, then build the level of challenge as you explore the video with different activities. Captions could be added later for language reinforcement.

Consider the importance of motivating and engaging all learners.  One way to do this would be to enable learner choice in watching material. If working on a theme for example – students could search for a short clip related to that theme and give reasons for their choices. In one of Keddie’s video ideas for example, he suggested students find and bring to class short clips of animals doing funny things.  During the lesson the students could describe what was happening before it was viewed and the rest of the class could try to guess the the animal involved.

These funny little animal clips are engaging in themselves, but giving students the choice in selecting their animal video increases their engagement with the content and with the task. There were 100’s of really short clips to choose from and I particularly enjoyed the numerous ways tortoises provide transport for other animals!  The important point here though for using video from the point of view of all the authors cited in this post is that it can enable learner autonomy. Not only can learners source content of their choosing (within limits) but go on to make their own videos as mentioned above. One interesting example Walker and White provide, is of students in Malaysia making a video dictionary. Amongst other tasks surrounding the words that students wanted to learn or revise was that of writing and acting out a scene that conveyed the meaning of each word and making a video of it. In this example these videos were later uploaded using YouTube for a One stop english project. The idea of learner autonomy with video can be taken still further in many contexts.  Using it as a flipped classroom tool for example. In this scenario, students view pause and play a selected video as many times as they need to outside the class, leaving classroom time freer for interactional activities.

What practical issues must we consider as teachers when using video?

Finding appropriate videos for use in the language classroom requires the same evaluative and principled approach as sourcing other authentic visual material, written or listening texts.  There is a huge and growing wealth of material available that can seem daunting to navigate, but it is increasingly apparent that both teachers and learners need to develop this navigational ability in order to take advantage of what video has to offer.  Part of this ability is simply to find and curate material, and one way of doing this is is by subscribing to channels on YouTube and saving videos into playlist.

There is however increasing help to navigate this function successfully and time efficiently by using dedicated video teaching resources.  Jamie Keddie’s ‘lessonstream’ website in which videos and lessons are packaged together is one example of these curated resources (reference the bunny above). Another is the ‘video for all’ website which aims to bring together current methodologies, ideas and practices that integrate digital video into language learning. It doesn’t have ready made lessons though. It shows different types of video use, with a corresponding pdf which explains key features and tools, plus useful articles.  And TED talks have  their own site at tedxesl.com  plus a number of specifically designed sites and blogs designed to exploit their videos with  prepared activities. I’ve been dipping into ‘Language Learning with Digital Video’ a print book by Goldstein and Driver, and its companion website digitalv.net  It contains a wealth of video related activities for teaches to use with example videos cited with information about where to find them and updating information at cambridge.org/9781107634840. I think all of these can help enormously in reducing the time input needed to responsibly source, manage and use video in the classroom.

A couple of further key practical tips from the Teresa Mackinnon article on the video for all website, which may seem obvious but could be easily overlooked, also seemed worth recording here.  These were:

•  make sure your video is available where you think it is and you know how to access it quickly
• your internet connection is sufficient and won’t be blocked
• alternatively download your video (check copyright)
•  have a non-internet/video back-up plan
• watch your video a couple of time to know your content thoroughly and avoid problem content

And the most useful practical tip from Goldstein and Driver on video creation (from my point of view) was:

• not to forget the sound quality – many new generation smart phones have a noise cancelling feature

Seminar tasks and concluding remarks

As our preparation for the seminar on this topic, there were different tasks for us to choose from.  Making and uploading a video (my choice); exploiting an online video  with ‘videotelling’, as referred to above; exploiting a TED talk with specific material designed to be used with it, also referred to above; and developing something using the Aurasma app and a linked video (this app discussed in later post on  digital technologies).

As my skill level approaching this task was very much at the entry level I chose the first task and for the record it’s here below.  It is very much a processual (learning task) piece of work.  I recorded it on my phone. It’s of 2 landscape gardeners installing some fencing and decking, for no other reason than I needed a subject to film and they happened to be around. The sound quality is poor, because it was windy (and my phone doesn’t have a noise cancelling feature) so I decided to overlay it with music. It’s short which is good. I added captions relating to what was happening and to show some dialogue because of the lack of sound. This is authentic speech, though this is transcribed into captions which are read not heard.  The video is related to continuous verb forms and lexis connected to building something.

On reflection, this video could be played without captions initially to promote  guessing and discussion about what was happening.  I wouldn’t paused to predict what might happen next as there is no real narrative to this video. I could use it as a model for students to make their own videos where they script and act out alternative continuous actions of their choice – perhaps on a theme, such as jobs or housework.  If students made their own videos they would be integrating their visual, text and digital literacies and there would be considerable opportunity for interaction as the videos were being designed and made (a higher order task). Finally  as students shared their videos with each other they would be sharing linguistic content, which would be multi-modal in nature. 

Despite highlighting some of the ways I could use this video, I would probably start again if I wanted to us a self made video with students. I’d have better equipment awareness for one thing.  I’d make sure the video fitted into my lesson plan for the learners at the time with a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve. I could easily upload and edit it though.

I would now be far more able to source and exploit  short on-line video and facilitating students to make their own videos too.

References:

Keddie, J. (2014,) Bringing online video into the classroom

Goldstein, B and Driver, P. (2014) Language Learning with Digital Video

Video as a Learning Resource for Language Teaching by Teresa MacKinnon

Walker, A and White, G (2013) Technology Enhanced Language Learning: Connecting Theory and Practice. Chapter 6.

Do visuals play an important role in ELT? Why?  And how can we make the most of them to exploit their power?

Pictures have the power to convey information, ideas and feelings.  They have been around far longer than the written word. In ELT they are extensively used for a number of important reasons summarised succinctly in Duchastel’s taxonomy for illustrations in instructional texts as follows:

• affective:provided to enhance interest and motivation
• attentive: intended to attract and direct attention
• didactic: intended to facilitate learning by showing something difficult to convey in words
• supportive: provided for less able learners
• retentional: provided to facilitate memorisation

29 Sep 1932 — Construction workers eat their lunches atop a steel beam 800 feet above ground, at the building site of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBI

Here’s a picture I’ve used in the past to help with an understanding of  ‘head for heights’.  If your knees feel wobbly looking at this, you probably don’t have one! I used it for didactic reasons as ‘head for heights’ is difficult to explain in words.

We use images because we know that ‘meaning making’ is a complex business and that “language  is but one of the communicative resources through which meaning is (re)made” (Early, M. et al. 2015).  Modes work together to provide meaning, validate it, and deepen understanding.  An image exploits the visual mode and images can include static photographs like this one; graphic images and cartoons; and moving images, namely video.  To elicit the same idea of ‘head for heights’ and its opposite ‘fear of heights’ I found this YouTube video which serves the same purpose  – to illustrate an abstract idea.

It’s interesting from a practical point of view to note here how I found both of these.  The first I simply googled on google images as I did when I used it the first time. However, I didn’t check if it was copyright protected at the time.  If I had wanted to reproduce or alter it in any way I might have breached copyright. Walker and White (2013) have some useful advice here in recommending the Creative Commons website which filters the images searched for, by those with permission to be used for non-commercial purposes. Not only that, they suggest that it generates more diverse images than a google search and that this could be useful in illustrating abstract ideas – such as the one I was attempting to convey.  This is what it says on their home page.

“Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that assists authors and creators who want to voluntarily share their work, by providing free copyright licences and tools, so that others may take full and legal advantage of the Internet’s unprecedented wealth of science, knowledge and culture.” (https://creativecommons.org). 

I used it to run my search again and that’s how I found the YouTube video above. On cross checking this process however, I found it just as easy to use the creative commons filter under ‘features’ directly in YouTube. The same applied to google images under their drop down tabs ‘search tools’ and ‘usage rights’.  In all cases it changed the images I was offered but as you can see below, and with the video, that doesn’t matter, as they do the job just as well. This was a useful lesson on sourcing images for me.

Ein waghalsiger Pressephotograph !
Gefährlicher Stand eines Pressephotographen an der äussersten Kante des 300 m hohen Deutschlandsenders in Königswusterhausen bei der Herstellung einer Zeitungsaufnahme.

Returning to the consideration of why images are important in ELT, it is necessary to understand the role of multi-modality.  Communicative resources or modes, are said to include “image, gaze, gesture, music, movement, speech and sound-effects” (Jewitt & Kress, 2003 p1, cited in Early, M. et al 2015).  And as Walker and White (2013: p84) point out, “All learning and teaching involves the use of a number of modes, speaking, writing, images, and movement, which give learners the opportunity to understand and combine information represented in different ways.” (More on this in my next post  – Sound and Vision).

This idea, particularly as it relates to images, is  supported by the work of Paivao (2006), who proposed a theory of ‘dual coding’ in which he claimed that “words and images are processed and stored in different ways by the brain,….and that images that gave the same messages as words could help learning and memorisation” (Walker and White, 2013: p80). In other words they function ‘retentionally’.  This research however has been both supported and contested, so Walker and White advise that assumptions about the positive effects of combining written texts and images should not automatically be made, although combining images and speech is more fully supported. Visuals then, might either enhance or distract understanding when used with written text, so it’s important as teachers to use them correctly. In an article that pre-dates Paivao’s work but covers similar research and associated arguments, Canning (1998) is reported thus:

Pictures help individual learners predict information, infer information, deduce information, analyze today’s world so that it can be brought into today’s classroom and offer social settings which can immerse or expose the learner to new ideas or further promote an already created setting. If a visual is used in a testing or teaching situation it can enhance clarity and give meaning to the text or to the message being communicated. 

(Canning-Wilson, C. (2001), in ELT Newsletter 48).

And in the same article, this author refers to learner preferences for visuals to be: in colour, related to a story, related to experiences, associated with events, people, places, and things that are familiar in some way.  Going on to highlight some of the ways pictures are used incorrectly, thus making them ineffective as learning aids, the following list is cited from the author’s previous work:

1. the use of violent scenes
2. too many distractors
3. too crowded or cause an overwhelming effect of information
4. too small or not clearly defined
5. stereotyped images
6. poor reproduction
7. not related to text
8. irrelevant captioning
9. offers too much information
10. unclear picture which doesn’t compliment the text
11. poorly scaled illustration
12. cluttered composition that is not aesthetically meaningful

In our seminar session on this topic, colleagues did presentations on different aspects of the relationship between visuals and ELT:

• on how info graphics and pictocharts can be exploited.
• on how to evaluate photos, images and graphics using Duchastel’s taxonomy and considering some of the potential problems mentioned in the list above.  
• and on how they have been used in coursebooks  – using the above criteria again but also considering  whether the visuals have just a functional role or whether they provoke a mental and linguistic reaction.

Hill, D.A. (2013), looked into this latter element and reported some interesting findings. He found, in his examination of 3 intermediate student courseooks, that over 50% of their pictures were purely decorative, which he describes as a “great waste of effort” (Hill, D.A. 2013, p163, in Tomlinson, B. (ed).  Even among those that performed a useful function – to define meanings or facilitate tasks for example, he found that they were useful only at a relatively low level, in that they failed to stimulate students “to use the language at their disposal creatively, starting from the pictures” (Hill, D.A. 2013,p162).  Hill refers to Corder, P (1966) to make the distinction between ‘talking about’ and ‘talking with’ a picture.  While the former is factual and descriptive, useful in some ways: it is limited. The latter could, he says, flow from the former, thus extending the usefulness of a single picture and allowing “learners to bring their own reality to a lesson” (Hill, D.A. 2013,p165).  In this way the visuals are a starting point, rather than and a means to 1 specific end.  They can create, as Keddie, (2009) points out, a space that can be filled by language.

Referring back to one of my pictures: I would choose the one of  the small boy in the glass skyscraper because it is colourful, sharp and uncluttered. Also, because it has no distracting and irrelevant text attached. 

I can still use it didactically to help make meaning.

I  could also use it descriptively to elicit and recycle associated vocabulary – skyscrapers,floors, lifts, view, clouds, city, for example.

Additionally however, I could  use it as Hill and others suggest, to allow  students to talk ‘with the picture’ – to bring their reality to it.  And to do that, I wrote a few simple prompts to accompany my new ‘legal’ picture.

• Have you ever been up a very tall building or to a very high place?

• Where and when was it? Who were you with?

• What was it like and how did you feel?

• Imagine you are this little boy. What’s the story of your day? How does this experience affect your life?

Having evaluated the choice of visual, decided how I might use it to elicit meaning, decided how I might uses it descriptively to talk about the picture, and written some prompts to enable students to talk with the visual, I have got an almost useable activity for a lesson.  I don’t have a context in which to use it though – no student need exists at present, and would have to convert it into classroom ready material and evaluate and amend it accordingly.  But it’s a start!

References:

Canning-Wilson, C (2001), Visuals & Language Learning: Is There A Connection? In ELT Newsletter 48, February 2001.

Early, M. et al. (2015) Multimodality: out from the margins of english language teaching. TESOL quarterly 49 (3).

Hill, D. A. (2013), The Visual Element in EFL coursebooks in Tomlinson,B (ed) Developing Materials for Language Teaching (2nd edn).

Walker, A and White, G (2013) Technology Enhanced Language Learning: Connecting Theory and Practice. Chapter 6.