Activity types

A brief history

It is interesting to see that video-based activities have, over the last decades, moved from very controlled, language-based tasks to comprehension-based ones and then to exploring a much freer role. Language focus tasks were adopted by early video English courses such as the BBC's Follow Me (from 1979). However, they are still used today on a whole host of online English language courses. For example, some of Vicki Hollett's Simple English Videos ( www.simpleenglishvideos.com ) focus on language items that are particularly problematic for language learners. The items are embedded in short dialogues that are used to exemplify the difference between them (for example, between interesting and interested or sympathetic and nice ).

Early video courses such as Follow Me included these short sequences or exchanges to highlight specific language items. However, within the same episode, they would also offer longer sequences in the form of comedy sketches. This was something taken up by a number of ELT ready-made video products such as Grapevine (Oxford University Press, early 1990s) which adopted elements of roles 1 and 2 (see Introduction, pp. 3–4 for a closer analysis of the key roles of video in the classroom) within a situation comedy or mini-drama storyline using professional comic actors. The chosen genre emphasized once again the light-hearted quality that it seemed video material was required to possess. Here, the target language was intended to be comprehensible and repeated by the learners with the emphasis on Skills practice – listening comprehension and after-you-watch speaking.

In the 1990s, the concept of ‘active viewing’ was established. Here the learner took a more active role than that of the passive viewer and the teacher began to use the interface more: freeze-framing with the remote control, segmenting long videos into shorter scenes, removing and adding subtitles, playing a video without sound, covering the screen and so on. Learners were also divided up into groups for information gap tasks such as jigsaw viewing. Although there were logistical difficulties with these kinds of activities, many of them are still pedagogically valid today.

More recently, shorter clips chosen from sites such as Vimeo or YouTube have become popular source material for educators, especially those with little or no dialogue so the class is not ‘distracted’ by comprehension.