ELT News Think Tank
Panelists: Marc | Curtis | Peter
Date: March 2004
Topic: "What ever happened to video in the classroom?"
Peter Viney
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I wonder if it's that video takes lessons in a certain direction and therefore eats up too much time? Is it regarded as a passive medium?
It shouldn't be, as video should be something students work with in an active way with the full range of paired, grouped, individual and
class-centred activities. Video used properly is NOT a passive viewing experience and needn't control the shape of the lesson.
I even wonder if it's the sort of misguided video talk at conferences ("How I used the Extended Version of Lord of The Rings with my
Pre-Intermediate Tourism class with examples of the worksheets I used over the three years it took"). This has been aggravated by the
strange decision of IATEFL to combine their video special interest group with their literature special interest group. Any idea that the
two are related betrays a deeply-misguided view of video. There has been far too much emphasis on using full-length authentic material at
the expense of tailor-made ELT material. I see video as an addition to the teaching repertoire, not an end in itself. If students want to
labour through a three hour film, it may be useful, but they can do it in their own time.
The cost of a purpose-made ELT video per student per minute is still very low, comparable with photocopying costs in many cases. In the end,
it can't be lack of material anymore, though my dream of having 40 or 50 one or two-minute segments to accompany a course has not been
achieved, and I can't see it happening in the present climate. But I detect a general lack of enthusiasm connected to video nowadays that
is depressing. I can't imagine teaching by blindfolding the students any more than I can imagine teaching with the whole class wearing
earplugs.
Technical Note: Video and DVD
One second of video has 25 frames or pictures in the PAL system (UK, Germany) or 30 frames in the older NTSC system (Japan, North
America). Realistically, PAL has more accuracy for copies of feature films, because movies are filmed at 24 frames a second. PAL generally
plays them one twenty-fifth faster, which you won't notice. NTSC has to "double" random frames to get the number to thirty, which makes it
jerkier.
Soon it will be DVD, but DVD isn't as good as video for a lot of activities, because it's harder to freeze on a single frame. DVD works by
compression. It only records the changes between one frame and another and composes them into a picture. Without a lot of fiddling around
it's hard to get within 5 or 6 frames of where you're going. When you're working with facial expressions, you really need to get the
precise frame quickly. We discovered this while writing the ELT version of A Grand Day Out. We obtained the DVD with subtitles and started
work. To replace the existing dialogue with simplified dialogue requires careful attention to mouth movements, and by the second day of
writing, we'd returned to the video.
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Panelists: Marc | Curtis | Peter
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Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author
Co-author of New American Streamline & Grapevine. Peter's Web site
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