During my time as a summer course homestay teacher video has played an essential role in my teaching and there are several reasons for this. Some are in accordance with trends regarding our use of technology generally and in ELT in particular. Others are to do with my teaching context in which the use of a coursebook is at best ill-suited at worst a complete nuisance.

In recent years the use of video has become increasingly popular in the English language classroom. Jamie Keddie, for example, is one of the major advocates of this medium. Over the years I have made extensive use of his great lesson ideas (lessonstream.org) and since I have been on my Master course at Brighton University I have started exploring the more theoretical underpinnings of his approach. Keddie has come up with some innovative and very effective ways of exploiting video material to its full potential using a variety of techniques depending on language level, learner type (age, context), language aim (grammar, function, pronunciation) or topic. He goes far beyond just showing a film in order to let the students summarise the content and thus emphasises that the ‘how’ of using video in the language classroom is of utmost importance: “Working with video in the classroom means designing tasks which maximize student interaction with it.” (Keddie, 2014: 75). He identifies the following five principles to achieve just that.

1) Don’t turn the classroom into a cinema – The main point here is that, according to Keddie, short videos are better suited to the classroom than long ones or feature length films. From a practical point of view that seems obvious as you don’t want to waste lesson time on students ‘just’ being entertained (or, in the worst case scenario, bored).

2) Deconstruct the video – “These [deconstruction techniques] involve isolating individual components of the video and presenting them to students before asking questions or setting tasks which require them to think about the bigger picture”. Here the aim is for students to actively engage with the material, to analyse different parts in isolation in order to better understand how these are used in particular ways to collectively tell a story.

3) Don’t be a slave to the spoken text – Keddie rightly points out that most online videos were not produced with language learners in mind, i.e. they present a variety of difficulties (e.g. speed of taking, difficult vocab, non-standard grammar) that have to be addressed by the teacher in order to make interaction with these videos achievable for learners.

4) See beyond the spoken word – the whole point of video compared with audio material on its own is that the spoken word is supported by “visual narratives” which can be exploited by using a number of techniques.

5) Combine with other materials – Keddie suggests that it is usually worth finding out what context a video comes from and what connections with other materials (e.g. websites, blogs, other videos) can be exploited in classroom activities (I suppose my use of the short video of Harry Potter’s ‘Monster Book of Monsters’ might be an example of this: as part of my blog I use it – after careful editing – to illustrate what my ‘ideal’ textbook might be, but originally it is a short clip from a scene in The Prisoner of Azkaban which itself is only one out of the whole series of eight Harry Potter films, which were based on J K Rowling’s seven books…) (Keddie, 2014: 74/75)

Even without looking into individual suggestions for specific procedures these help to tailor activities using video to student needs and settings.

Apart from being inspired by Keddie, I have also been influenced by Freda Mishan’s considerations regarding the theory behind and use of ‘authentic’ materials. Mishan sees film as part of the battery of authentic materials and amongst these “the one that’s designed to appeal most directly and fully to our [our students’] emotions” (Mishan, 2005: 216). What makes materials ‘authentic’, i.e. the definition of ‘authenticity’, has been the topic of, at times, heated discussion. I won’t go into detail here apart from acknowledging that one of the main problems seems to be that any material, as soon as it gets taken out of its original context – the context it was originally intended for – loses its authenticity: “[…] texts are de-authenticated if their original context is tampered with.” (13). For example, as soon as a teacher decides to use a newspaper article in the classroom, it changes its nature from written text intended to inform or entertain a newspaper reader who can freely choose to interact with this text according to her reading preferences, interests or information needs to a text whose main purpose it becomes to make a teaching point (e.g. to examine grammar, do develop vocabulary, to hone reading skills, as a stimulus for discussion etc.). Be that as it may, I agree with Mishan who calls attention to the fact that authentic materials (in their most basic definition as any material not purposefully designed for language teaching) can add ‘currency’, provide a ‘challenge’ or make a point about ‘culture’. Regarding the first, they are usually more up-to-date than most published ELT materials and might therefore be perceived by learners as potentially more relevant and interesting. Furthermore the ‘challenges’ presented by authentic text can be very motivating as learners feel pride at being able to deal with and understand something that was originally intended for native speakers (as long as the teacher ‘packages’ this appropriately – see Keddie above). Lastly authentic materials provide an opportunity for teacher and students to reflect on and explore aspects of ‘culture’. The fact that they can be understood as products and simultaneously representations of the culture they were produced in potentially confronts learners with different concepts, a different point of view and different ideas about topics (e.g. the ‘Inner Nationality Quiz’).

In the homestay context authentic materials are both easily accessible (the entire study abroad context is essentially made up of authentic materials) and indispensable as they provide a viable and much needed alternative to coursebook content. Not just I as the teacher but also my students can easily pull them into the lesson and in doing so make lesson content more stimulating, personal, of-the-moment and basically fun and interesting. Amongst authentic materials online videos are probably the ones I have used most frequently and my students have found them the most engaging. Below is one of my recent favourites, which I came across on the British Council website (lesson idea by Nicola Crowley) two years ago:

I would like to briefly look into some lesson ideas around this video mainly to show my development regarding principles underlying classroom activities and relationships between participants in the classroom through my engagement with texts, ideas and people over the course of my MA. I won’t produce a list against which to check lesson activities in order to offer up some number. In agreement with Littlejohn (in Tomlinson ed., 2011: 185) I believe that especially in the case of pre-use (or hypothetical use) evaluation the evaluator’s considerations become increasingly subjective (objective description → subjective analysis → subjective inference) and quantifying data that results from the last step to me looks like an attempt to make this subjectivity appear more scientific than it can ever be. Scenarios where this might be justified are where several evaluators are faced with the evaluation of large numbers of textbooks, as here some sort of system is needed that helps maintain consistency across everyone’s work (Roberts, 1996: 376). In my comparative ‘evaluation’ I will simply describe the activities and see how they fare against Jamie Kedddie’s principles above.

What firstly speaks in favour of using this video is that it is very short, as advised by Keddie. Secondly I think it is a nice example of the use of video to ‘see beyond the spoken word’. In fact, there are no words at all in this video. However, if you listen closely, the audio is very evocative. Now it is necessary to look at the procedure suggested for the lesson around the above video on the British Council website:

Asking students to listen without watching illustrates how video can be deconstructed and how by doing that students are given the opportunity to examine the different elements of the video in separation. I particularly like the idea of students being asked to make up their own story in their heads to go with the sounds they hear. I have done this with several of my students and especially when I have pairs it is very entertaining (and I hope therefore engaging) for everyone involved in the task. Although everyone can hear the water, different students come up with different visual scenarios that could go with the sounds surprising each other with their imagination and me, who has obviously seen the video and is now ‘stuck’ its actual images.

The next steps in the procedure on the British Council website are different from what I have tended to do with students (I cannot remember whether the procedure was like this when I first came across the lesson and I just didn’t read/remember it properly – happens sometimes under extreme time pressure – or whether the original post on the website has been changed since I first saw it two years ago). Jamie Keddie calls this ‘collaborative storybuilding’ (2014: 80). I believe that storytelling is an essentially human trait that can and should be developed because being able to tell each other ‘good’ stories helps us to make deeper connections with each other. Therefore I think it is a great activity from a humanistic point of view. Of course, it is also ideal to promote language development (writing a storyboard) while being accessible to students of a wide range of language abilities (drawing or drawing + writing storyboards if writing alone is too difficult).

What I have done with students after them listening to the video is much less exciting. After discussing their own ideas about what goes with the sounds, I let them watch the video and then first verbally and then in writing describe what is happening. In this way, students have an opportunity to practise speaking/writing as well as to attend to grammar, e.g. present continuous vs present simple forms (e.g. ‘Two men are sitting in a boat. They are fishing. Suddenly something pulls on the line…’). How boring! In my defence I can only say that students keep asking me for grammar practice and that deep down my German language training has turned me into a grammar pedant. I suppose some attention to form could still be a sideline activity but obviously ‘collaborative storytelling’ is much more interactive and creative and therefore fits my newly-discovered principles (and Keddie’s) much better. The suggested extension activity – students can read the screenplays or storyboards and vote [my emphasis] which one should be made into a film – further demonstrates how student-centredness is at the heart of all considerations regarding this lesson (it fully recognises students’ right to their voice). Overall I think this is a very good lesson idea (even my slightly deficient version) which uses a great video in effective and interesting ways.

References:

Keddie, J. (2014) Bringing online video into the classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Littlejohn, A (2011) ‘The analysis of language teaching materials: inside the Trojan Horse’ in Tomlinson, B (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mishan, F. (2005) Designing Authenticity into Language Learning Materials. Bristol: Intellect Books

Roberts, J T (1996), ‘Demystifying Materials Evaluation’, System 24. No. 3. pp 375-389