Interview
 Peter Viney
Peter Viney started his EFL career in the early 70s at Anglo-Continental, and he has been
involved in materials development and teacher training for over 20 years.
His co-authored textbooks include Streamline, Grapevine,
Handshake and Survival English. Viney's first ELT video was published
in 1985 and set the pattern that most ELT videos have followed ever since. His
latest project is the adaptation of Wallace and Gromit's A Close Shave
for the ELT classroom. (Spring 2000)
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On ELT
ELT: How has the ELT field changed since you started in the profession?
PV: I started teaching at the end of my first year at university, teaching German summer
vacation students. I was about three years older than the students. In those days the
materials were total rubbish, and I discarded them and taught from Simon and Garfunkel
and Beatles records instead. I started teaching full time in 1971, and materials quickly
started getting better. Robert O'Neill's Kernel lessons Intermediate was the first
fully-satisfying course book I taught. By the late 70s, things were getting vastly more
professional. The RSA exams were a major influence on that. Things took a dive after 1980,
with teachers in a worse position than they had been in the late 70s.
American English courses have changed from a 'So you want to immigrate into the USA'
approach to an American English as an international language approach that brought it
closer to British ELT.
When I started, there were a small number of textbooks available, and the number then
increased hugely, though it appears to be contracting as publishers merge. In twenty
years of travelling, I've seen the standards of non-native speaker teachers improve most
dramatically. Their English is better, their skills far greater.
On Teaching
Some of your course books have accompanying videos. How effective is the use of
videos in language learning? Will they become more widespread?
This is my hobby-horse. If I were running a language school now, I'd have a TV in every
classroom, and I'd use it in most lessons. Short courses would be based entirely on video
materials. Most video books provide a great deal of work that is inspired by the video
students have watched, but don't require the use of video in the later lessons. English
Channel is already being used as the only coursebook on some short courses. On longer
courses, video would still be a vital element. It's insane that audio-cassettes and CDs
are used so much more widely than video. There are all sorts of listening comprehension,
pronunciation and mechanical activities that require the use of audio, but for providing
a context and embracing communication skills work, video is unbeatable.
There are now a decent number of video courses available. Our stuff leans heavily towards
fiction and comedy, but you can get songs, documentary material, "vox pop"
material, news based material and so on as well. The technology is improving. We've
been using the original version on of "A Close Shave" DVD rather than videotape
in working on an ELT adaptation this year. The access to points in the video is so much
easier, the tape isn't going to wear out and the picture is sharper. DVD won't
be the perfect answer yet.
The "jog/shuttle" control on video machines makes it
much easier to play around repeating words or sentences than with DVD machines. You can
easily locate single frames with video. It's slightly more hit and miss with DVD on a
computer, with a nasty tendency for digital break-up to intrude when you keep going over
the same few frames. They say that Apple have corrected some of the problems with DVD
playback and it will run better in system OS.X. Whatever, it's going to be perfect
very soon indeed.
Once we'd finished the adaptation and re-recorded the soundtrack, we were back to
video anyway as we need a time-coded copy (where you have an index number for every frame
– remember there are twenty five frames a second on PAL, thirty on NTSC) to locate
stills for use in the accompanying book.
A good teacher doesn't even need a blackboard, but video is such an asset that it has
to become universal in the classroom, and the sooner the better. Teachers always quote
prices as prohibitive, comparing them with (e.g.) a store-bought copy of "The Phantom
Menace." As with hard disk space and microchips, video will get cheaper. Do you
realize that CDs and DVDs are cheaper to manufacture than cassettes and videotapes?
Nonetheless, manufacturers get away with charging a premium for them. But ELT videos will
always be far more expensive than movies or concerts. The formula is simple: production
cost divided by likely sales. ELT videos sell a few thousand. The Phantom Menace sells
many millions.
I know how much these ELT videos cost to make, and believe me the publishers
aren't ripping anyone off. And in "Only in America" you even get to have
Edward Norton in your classroom."Only in America" is the title that gets most
hits on our ELT website (www.viney.uk.com)
I was thrilled because it's my favourite of our videos. Then we analysed the hits and
found that many of them came from within the USA (where we haven't sold many copies).
We followed some links and found that it's linked from several Edward Norton fan
websites.
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