ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Curtis Kelly

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Curtis
Date: March 2004

Topic: "What ever happened to video in the classroom?"

Video: Dante's Secret Rung

Curtis Kelly

I, like Peter, have been using video since before VHS was invented, and generally, it has been a lot of trouble. I think Peter sums up the beauties and beasties of using video almost perfectly in his article. I'll repeat something similar, but as a narrative.

Stage Center, Joe, an EFL teacher in Japan, and he decides to use video. He has heard about other teachers' alleged successes with Mr. Bean – "Well, non-verbal communication is part of language too, isn't it?" – and Shakespeare in Love – "Yeah, there were subtitles in Japanese, but I told my students not to read them" – and yet, something about those choices bothers him. He considered a video specially prepared for use in the EFL classroom, like Robert O'Niell's infamous The Lost Secret, but the local seller his school uses, charges ¥50,000 per video, which is exactly how much he makes per month from that school as a part-time teacher. Instead, he rummages through the four videos his sister sent him last year and finds a copy of Friends, a US sitcom. No subtitles, lots of rich language, and most of the language still exists in the modern lexicon. Good choice.

“The picture is pretty poor, since his edited version is a copy of the copy of the copy his sister had, and videos do not transfer well, but the sound, is well, audible.”

So, what does he do now? He can't just show the video, because his students will probably react the way his Japanese wife did when they watched it. Five minutes in, she fell asleep. He concludes that he'll have to edit it down, keeping as much of the main story as possible; transcribe it, making it comprehensible to his Eigo II kids; and write exercises, so they won't just be passive listeners.

To do the editing, he borrows a second VHS deck from his neighbor, and spends three hours trying to hit the record button on the slave deck soon enough that with preroll, he catches most of the first line of the target dialog: "–'t in the world is tha..." Never mind the post-nuclear lightning storm effects his deck leaves between scenes. Three days later, he finishes editing the 21-minute original down to 17 minutes. The picture is pretty poor, since his edited version is a copy of the copy of the copy his sister had, and videos do not transfer well, but the sound, is well, audible.

Next comes the transcribing, and suddenly Joe faces the same problem anthropologists and discourse analysts have grappled with for decades: He can't really catch all the English; he has to worry dozens of half sentences, grunts, and utterances into something linguistically rational; and with only half the tape done, he has already transcribed 18 pages. Okay, Joe decides, let's just do the key dialogs.

So, two weeks later, Joe starts working on exercises, but can't decide on what exercises to use. Cloze tests or dictations? No, too much rewinding. Vocabulary lists to memorize and quizzes? No. It was his dislike of linguistic clerical work that made him use video in the first place. Comprehension questions on content? If they can't get the language in the first place, how are they going to be able to process the comprehension questions? And it seems so pedantic. Okay, he'll try a mixture of these, and some discussion questions, like "How does Rachel's history with Ross make this scene funny?" Oh well. Maybe just showing the video is good enough after all.

Finally, after weeks of preparation, the day of the actual showing comes. He takes his homemade Friends tape to his two Eigo II classes. He makes copies of the 24 pages of transcripts for his students to read at home if they want, and goes to the first class. On arrival, he finds out that if he wants to use the video deck, he has to get a key from building 7. That takes 12 minutes. He comes back, unlocks the case and turns on the equipment. He slips in his video, hits "play," turns on the TV, and suddenly, everyone is watching a Japanese fisherman slicing a tuna.

He is in TV, not video, mode. He panics and hits every button on the remote control, labeled in Japanese, of course, with no effect. Six minutes later, he pleads for help from anyone in his class. Eventually, one of his students comes up and gets the video on screen, but to Joes horror, 6 minutes of Friends has already elapsed. After losing another couple of minutes rewinding and restarting, he finally gets the show started, but what's this? The frames are jumping up and down every few seconds, as if the automatic tracking mechanism can't handle tapes recorded abroad. It can't. He is still better off than his UK buddy that tried to show a PAL tape, but the quality of the picture, the sound, and ultimately, his lesson, is pretty dismal. He ends up stopping the tape every couple of minutes and explaining what happened in Japanese. Then, a few minutes before the climatic finish of the story, the bell rings. He's angry, and he doesn't let his students go to lunch until they have seen the whole damn thing.

During his own lunch break, he discusses his problems with anyone who listens, until his advisor, Marc, comes up and tells him that he might be violating copyright laws. At that moment, he decides to give up on using the video in his next class, or ever again, which is probably for the better. He would have wasted 11 minutes in his next class trying to rewind the tape to the place where the Friends show started.

Like Joe, many of us have had experiences like this, which is one reason, Peter (well, twenty-four to be exact), why video never became savior of the classroom. Horns and forked tail.

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Curtis

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Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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