Sound and Vision

In today’s blog entry, I will be discussing how I moved on, albeit slightly, from video as “glorified audio” (Goldstein, 2017, p. 24), which is considered an anachronistic model but one that I have seen practised in many classrooms during my career (and have actively indulged in myself). Video and image share many similar qualities and we can use video in the same way as images but with some key differences. The pedagogy behind video and written text followed similar development trajectories but as the way we use written text in class has changed, so has video. We cannot ignore the increasing prevalence of video in our lives helped along by the proliferation of high-speed internet connectivity everywhere we go. This has led to realisation that video is no longer considered a passive activity and part of this is also attributable to the rise of social media and the immediacy of reactions to watching content. The final area I will touch on is the importance of paralinguistic features of communication and how video offers something that traditional print-based materials could not.

One of the main issues I have with using video in lessons is the length. I personally find that 2-to-3 minutes sufficient, but the average YouTube video is approximately 12 minutes (Tankovska, 2021). TED talks are up to 18 minutes long (TED, 2020). This is in line with how I treat audio and I find 6-to-7-minute segments in higher level course books incredibly challenging to work with. I would often ask learners to do those listening tasks in their own time, although many did not. The other issue which I did not really consider was the socio-linguistic context of video and how it can reveal much about other cultures (Clare, 2017, pp. 35-36).

I was pleasantly surprised when another student presented an animated video, Cuerdas (Cuerdas Cortometraje Oficial, 2014), that she had used for English language teaching, which was entirely in Spanish. Thus, highlighting the importance of the moving image over the audio track. Although long at over 10 minutes, there were themes, motifs and issues that would appeal to learners and bring an emotional response (Witcher & Donaghy, 2014). The video clip I presented was a trail for a BBC television series about Valley Boys in Wales, which I had used in teaching adult South Korean learners. This was rooted in my reluctance to forego audio but also because of the learners’ desire to hear a broader range of British accents and learn more about British culture. This clip reflected changes happening in South Korea and was chosen because it would trigger emotional responses from the learners, touching on gender biases, wealth, age and human aesthetics. A lot of my focus with video is on bringing the paralinguistic features of communication to the forefront of the learners’ mind and also the top-down processing of this information in conjunction with audio information. I must admit that there were issues with “cognitive overload” (Guichon & Cohen, 2016, p. 666) for some learners with so many variables to work with and no control over the playback. In hindsight, making the video available to learners to watch and playback at their leisure may have reduced the cognitive cost (ibid).

My use of video, and it seems many of the other students’ on this course, follow the traditional teaching format of pre-viewing task, while-viewing task, and post-viewing task commonly associated with reading/listening texts (Donaghy, 2019). In much the same way that teaching reading/listening skills has moved away from this model, use of video has begun to move away as well.

Video as warmer, to activate schema, was a popular use among our cohort of students on this course. Jamie Keddie presented us with a task we have used with our learners: the pause-predict-play activity (2020) but he goes further in developing the tasks derived from his chosen video so that learners are not constrained by what is presented on screen. The video’s appearance in his lesson is inverted and appears at the end upon completion of the tasks based on his chosen video. He goes even further and creates an additional video to use with the original. Suffice to say that none of us went that far in our use of video. He also talks about the motivation behind the creation of the video he used and links it with monetisation and advertising revenue. It is a very holistic approach to using video in the classroom compared to the more traditional usage discussed earlier.

This treatment of video makes the activity much more active than how we traditionally think about watching video (Clare, 2017). We are moving into higher order thinking skills and with the tools available to us now, we can remix and reimagine videos and share these responses. This is something that wasn’t possible only a short time ago and leans on “remix literacy” (Dudeney & Hockly, 2016, p. 173). The important development is how the task we set learners has evolved and the focus is moving towards communicative competency over grammar or lexical competency. It is in this light of communicative competency that the paralinguistic features of communication become an important feature rather than a visual representation of grammar or language. This is all bound in “cultural and intercultural literacy” (ibid, pp.172-173) and is often highlighted in the different hand gestures employed in various cultures around the world. As educators and as learners, awareness of how actions (or inactions) are perceived are as important as knowing common learner errors exhibited by people from various cultural and language backgrounds.

It is this change from glorified audio to central role in digital literacies that marks video out as an important feature of language learning in the future. Learners will not only consume video but will engage critically with video content and redefine and remix it in their response and/or critique of it. The ubiquity of cameras and recording devices coupled with increasingly easy access to internet connectivity will only further the evolution of video in language learning.

 

References

Clare, A., 2017. The power of video. In: K. Donaghy & D. Xerri, eds. The Image in English Language Teaching. Malta: ELT Council, pp. 33-42.

Cuerdas Cortometraje Oficial, 2014. CUERDAS english subtitles. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtrHIa0RkAo
[Accessed 17 March 2021].

Donaghy, K., 2019. Using Film to Teach Languages in a World of Screens. In: C. Herrero & I. Vanderschelden, eds. Using film and media in the language classroom: reflections on research-led teaching. s.l.:Multilingual Matters, pp. 27-43.

Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N., 2016. Literacies, technology and language teaching. In: F. Farr & L. Murray, eds. The Routledge handbook of language learning and technology. s.l.:Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 166-180.

Goldstein, B., 2017. A history of video in ELT. In: K. Donaghy & D. Xerri, eds. The Image in English Language Teaching. Malta: ELT Council, pp. 23-32.

Guichon, N. & Cohen, C., 2016. Multimodality and CALL. In: F. Farr & L. Murray, eds. The Routledge handbook of language learning and technology. s.l.:Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 660-676.

Keddie, J., 2020. A video prediction activity: “Things that could go wrong at a wedding”. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSMNzF-9Qro
[Accessed 15 March 2021].

Tankovska, H., 2021. Average YouTube video length as of December 2018, by category(in minutes). [Online]
Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20report%2C%20the%20average%20video%20length,as%20of%20December%202018%2C%20by%20category%20%28in%20minutes%29
[Accessed 10 May 2021].

TED, 2020. Organize a local TEDx event. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ted.com/participate/organize-a-local-tedx-event/tedx-organizer-guide/speakers-program/event-program
[Accessed 10 May 2021].

Witcher, A. & Donaghy, K., 2014. A Visual Manifesto for Language Teaching. [Online]
Available at: https://vimeo.com/113420504
[Accessed 10 May 2021].

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