Ben Goldstein discusses the use of video in teaching, its history and how it has changed over time.
So, Ben, how has the use of video in teaching changed over the past thirty years?
When video first started to be used in the ELT classroom, it wasn’t integrated into the rest of the lesson. Teachers tended just to use it as light relief at the end of the week. These days, video is increasingly seen as integral to learning – not just for practising listening skills, but as a resource in itself. We’re switching from focussing purely on language skills and structures, towards video becoming a stimulus for other tasks. And as the flipped classroom model grows in popularity, video’s increasingly being used outside the classroom too. Learners are now watching teaching materials on video at home before coming to the classroom to practise what they’ve learned. That’s a more efficient use of everyone’s time. Video has also revolutionised teacher training. On the online MA course I teach, for instance, I send video tutorials to the class, and our feedback sessions take place through video conferencing.
Traditionally, the videos we’ve used in the classroom have had quite a bad reputation for stilted dialogue and bad acting. Is that fair?
In the beginning, yes – with their focus on targeted language, those videos from the 1980s were really quite childish and patronising, even though they were generally made by professional directors working with very good actors. These days, publishers have recognised that students need something more authentic. That’s why they’ve started partnering with big media companies – people who produce materials students might actually want to watch outside the classroom! Cambridge’s partnership with Discovery Education TM is a good example of this.
What lessons can we learn from the history of video in the ELT classroom?
More experienced teachers, who’ve been using video for many years, may find it quite liberating that video is no longer just being used as ‘enhanced audio’. If we move away from the attitude of “What grammar point will we be learning through using this video?” we can embrace the visual for itself, and its ability to prompt discussion.
For this to work, we need to challenge student and teacher expectations that they should be able to understand every word. With authentic material, it doesn’t matter so much if the language is at a higher level than students are used to, as long as the video is stimulating. We have to grade the task, and not the input.