The moving image

For well over fifty years, language teachers have been using the moving image both in and outside the classroom. Back in the early 1990s, video was seen as a reward, a form of light relief. It was viewed as a leisure-time activity probably because of its association with television and the idea of passive viewing. You typically showed a video on a Friday afternoon after a hard week's grammar. In those days, the video could consist of an hour or more of a popular film. Sometimes this was even shown for its own sake; in other words, there was not necessarily any task designed around it. Learners could give a summary of what had happened or initiate a discussion based on the video's content, but generally speaking, the video was poorly exploited and not integrated into the lesson.

From being very much peripheral to the main business of language learning, the moving image has shifted to becoming a prime source of content. Not only that, but learner-created video is now as central a focus in the classroom as material introduced by the teacher or institution.

Such a shift clearly echoes what is going on in society at large. The moving image is taking centre stage in our everyday landscape of communication: ‘What we are now seeing is the gradual ascendance of the moving image as the primary mode of communication around the world: one that transcends languages, cultures and borders.’ (Apkon, 2013 , p. 24)

Learners can now access video material at home and on the move, via smartphones and tablets. Watching a film on a big screen in the darkness of the cinema surrounded by strangers has been replaced by the possibility of watching the same thing on a shrunken phone-size screen in isolation and just about anywhere with an internet connection. Likewise, what was once encased in a VHS box or a plastic DVD jacket – very much a separate entity – is now fully integrated into our other classroom materials and is made available via video podcast (vodcast), online streaming or as downloads.

Video has been instrumental in changing concepts of classroom space and settings. In a ‘flipped’ or decentralized classroom scenario, video is the only form of input or instruction, with the learners accessing this information online at home, while the classroom space is given over to discussion, negotiation and the sharing of ideas.