by Elizabeth Mejia

In the past fifteen years, with the increase in access to videos and video technology, language teachers have begun to use video as a tool in the classroom.  After a decade of increasingly more developed usage, it is possible to make some generalizations about the most common ways videos are used in language instruction.
 To understand how videos are used, you should first understand what is meant by the word "video."  This word has come to refer to many different classroom tools.  "Video" in language learning may mean the use of popular films on video to provide content. "Video" can also mean the use of smaller pieces of broadcast material, used both in whole and in part.  Short documentaries and television advertisements are  examples of broadcast material that can be used to provide content and teach structure.   "Video" can also refer to professionally produced tapes specifically written and designed for classroom instruction.  These tapes  generally accompany books and provide scripted dialogs and developed language activities.  A drawback to this type of material is that because it is scripted and professionally prepared, it often does not use authentic language.  "Video" can also refer to amateur productions developed by individual teachers and classes.  Videotaping classroom projects and presentations is a useful way to help students improve pronunciation and overall fluency.  Finally, "video" can refer to the use of news broadcasts to provide content and to teach specific features of authentic language.  In short, videos are a valuable tool that can enhance a classroom experience, proving that a picture is truly worth the proverbial 1,000 words.

News Videos in the Language Classroom

News has always been a focus of modern language teaching lessons.  Since the news is of vital importance to all, it usually requires no effort on the part of the teacher to motivate students to listen to the news. In the early 1990s, Cable News Network (CNN) joined the broadcasters who were working with news as a teaching medium.  It now offers the nightly CNN Newsroom broadcast, a 30 minute, commercial-free news broadcast that teachers can tape and use in classrooms.  The accompanying lesson plans for these materials are available on-line at the CNN Newsroom site.  A noteworthy feature of these Newsroom broadcasts is that they incorporate both up-to-the-minute headline news as well as the feature broadcasts found in publications such as the Focus On  series.  As Mejia (1989) has pointed out, headline news, although it quickly becomes dated, has the advantage of being of immediate importance to the student.  In addition, a story of some impact, such as the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, will generally take several weeks to resolve itself, giving students an opportunity to enhance their listening with each news update. Apart from the obvious interest factor, news broadcasts have their formulaic rhetorical structures to recommend them as teaching tools.  A casual viewing of an hour of CNN news will show even the most casual viewer that there is an easily discernible  pattern of organization and language features.  Most news  episodes start with a newscaster raising the issue of the upcoming episode with a teaser, a brief overview of the issue to stimulate interest and get the viewer ready to listen.  News is often presented in a general to specific pattern, with many of the basic journalistic questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how) partially answered at the beginning of the broadcast.  Newscasters generally provide summary-style lead-ins to comments made by persons interviewed on the news.  News is often divisible into the categories of issue-based news (such as whether a certain bill will pass in Congress) and factual recounting (such as news updates regarding the death of Princess Diana).  Usually, in issue-based news broadcasts, an attempt is made to provide a viewpoint from both sides of the issue.
Finally, the news provides an excellent model of the dialect known as Network Standard (McCrum et al., 1992).  This dialect is the closest American English comes to a standard dialect that is recognized as uniformly acceptable to all levels of American and Canadian society.

How to Use News Videos to Teach Language Skills

The Looking Ahead series provides a free video of CNN news clips when you adopt a book in the series.   These CNN materials are thematically integrated into each of the chapters in each of the books, offering you a method for enhancing your classroom lessons.
The following suggestions are offered to help you get started in developing lessons with these broadcasts.
In planning a lesson that incorporates video, one must first consider several questions:

1. When will the video be used--before, while, or after using the accompanying book materials?

2. What is the level of the class and the particular strengths and weaknesses of the students?

3. What is the level of video access?

4. What pitfalls should be avoided in planning the lesson?

Listening is always enhanced if the students are well prepared to listen.  The following are some preteaching strategies to use with video lessons. You may wish to use one or more of these activities to help students get ready to listen.
Consider a discussion activity before you turn the t.v. on.  For example, if the broadcast is about heroism, you may wish to ask students to discuss a question such as What is your personal definition of heroism?  in small groups before watching.  Responses can also be enhanced by having students free write on the question before discussing it.
Before listening, show the entire clip with the sound off (press "mute" on your remote control).  Have students focus on the images and discuss what they think the video broadcast will be about.  This works particularly well with small groups.
Preteach any unusual vocabulary before listening.  A caution here:  one of the goals in teaching listening is to teach students to understand  vocabulary in context.  Preteaching of  vocabulary should be kept to a minimum.   However, Katchen (1993) has pointed out that a difficulty in using news broadcasts is the large number of references to places and the extensive use of proper names that one hears in such a broadcast.  You may want to preteach such references.  Any  preteaching should give students an opportunity to pronounce words several times so that they can develop their aural perception of the words.
Play the teaser (introductory material) to the broadcast two or three times.  Have students give answers to the six journalistic questions - who, what, when  where, why, and how - from the information they have heard in the teaser.  Students can share this information with each other and  the teacher can compile a list of the information on the board and questions that remain unanswered.
The following are suggestions for teaching with a news broadcast.  As Stempleski (1987) has noted, repeated viewing is one of the keys to success with using video in the ESL classroom.  After any preteaching, you will probably show the video clip about five times.

Here is a possible sequence of activities:

Listening #1.  Play the entire broadcast.  Have students listen without taking notes.  The purpose of this listening is to relax them and make them comfortable with the language.

Listening #2.  Play the entire broadcast.  Have students listen and write one sentence in which they identify the main idea of the broadcast and write a question they have about what they heard.  Have students circulate throughout the class, sharing ideas and questions with other
students in the class.

Listening #3.  Before you begin, divide the tape into segments of approximate thirds.   Develop who, what, when, where, why, and how questions for each third.  Provide students with a copy of these questions.  Play the tape in thirds, stopping after each third at least a minute to give students enough time to answer the questions and then share the answers with a partner.  Review the answers to all the questions after the last third has been played.

Listening #4.  If the news broadcast includes interviews with different people, assign students to listen for the parts spoken by different people.  For example if there are three people interviewed, assign each student a number 1-3.  Students assigned #1 will listen for the first interviewee; students assigned #2 will listen for the second interviewee; students assigned #3
will listen for the third interviewee.  After listening, have the students get into groups by numbers (e.g. all the #1 students in one group), and decide what were the most important points that the interviewed person made to contribute to the news story.  Then, have the groups report their results to the entire class.

Listening #5.  Play the entire tape through one more time.  Divide students into small groups of three and have them group write a short one-paragraph summary of what they have heard.
 
After you have ensured that students understand the broadcast, you may wish to have students do one of these follow-up activities for a given broadcast:  Listen to another CNN broadcast on a similar topic.  Do one of the speaking or writing activities that are given in the following sections of this article.

Developing Speaking Skills

Although many of the listening activities suggested above require some speaking, after working with listening, you may wish to consider some of the following activities for more focused speaking activities:

Intonation activities.  The introductory material in news broadcasts is often carefully written to provide a good model of intonation and stress patterns.   Have students mark a copy of the script provided with your materials, underlining those content words that receive the heaviest stress and indicating with arrows where intonation rises and falls.  Then,  have pairs of students  practice repeating the sentences, trying to mimic the model on the tape as much as possible.
Have students produce their own version of the newscast by reading their summaries of the broadcast.  Students can do this in small groups.  This can be made into a focused pronunciation lesson by asking students to tape their summaries (this can be done outside of class) and then reviewing their tapes for pronunciation and intonation features.
Have students develop a follow-up interview about the broadcast. For example, if the broadcast is a feature about what it means to be a hero, students could develop an interview in which they ask other students, or Americans, about heroism.  The presentation of the results of these interviews can be audio-taped or video-taped as well, depending on available technology.
Have students produce a video news broadcast of their own on a related topic, using the CNN broadcast as a model.    A less technologically demanding alternative is to produce a radio broadcast on a related topic, using audio-tape.   In large classes, the class can be divided into small groups, with each group producing a part of the final broadcast.  For more information on classes in which this has successfully been done, see Alsop (1984) and Tupper (1995).

Developing Writing Skills

Although the listening and speaking activities listed above do incorporate some writing, you may wish to consider the following activities when preparing more direct writing-based lessons:
As a previewing activity, consider a free  write about the topic of the broadcast before you do any of the listening activities.  Students can then share their free writes with each other as a preparation for listening.
As a post-viewing activity, have students develop a list of questions they still have about the video broadcast.  Students can then share their questions with each other and get answers.
A class newspaper is another possible writing activity.  Have Students write up what they heard in the broadcast in article format, complete with a headline, a byline, and possibly student-developed art work.  This will give them opportunities to review journalistic writing (getting the general answers to the journalistic questions into the first sentence or two) and quotation and citation as well.  This class newspaper can be expanded to include newspaper articles about genuine local news of interest to the students.
A WEB version of the newspaper is another option. Another possible post-viewing activity is a follow-up letter to one of  the people interviewed in the broadcast.  For example, if a scientist is interviewed about a new technology, students might want to write a letter to the scientist asking for more information or posing questions that they have.  In some cases, careful WEB searching may locate the address of the actual person, in which case the letters can be e-mailed to the person.
Depending on the level and academic goals of the class, students can do library or WEB research on the topics raised in the video.  The results of this research can be written up in short report form.

When to Use the CNN Video Clips

This will depend on your particular goals.  There are many possible configurations for working with video.  Some teachers like to do all of the book material for a given unit first, then the video material.  Some like to do some of the video material first (perhaps the listening), then some of the book material, and then more video material (perhaps a writing assignment).  There is no one correct way to use video (Stempleski, 1987);  flexibility of approach will help you determine the best way for you to feel comfortable with working with video.
Working with the Level of the Class
The operative word here is flexibility.  A class with advanced listening skills may not need all of the activities suggested in the section on listening activities.  A class with low-level listening skills may need many more than five listenings per broadcast episode.  A shy class of timid speakers may need more guided activities, such as the radio summary-reading activity, before trying something as free as producing their own news broadcast.  A class with beginning writing skills may have difficulty writing and may need a free-write to loosen their inhibitions.  A more advanced class might skip this step.  Only you can determine what works best for your students, but the rule in video education is always:  be prepared to be flexible.
Issues of Video Access
We don't all live in a technologically perfect world.  Before using your videos, you may wish to consider some of the following access constraints, which will impact the way in which you conduct video lessons:
The Ideal Situation: This is a set-up in which you  can show and control the video in the individual classroom or in a special media-equipped classroom to which he or she can take the class.  Options here include VCRs on carts, built-in video players, and beamed-in video from a remote projector.  Such a situation allows for maximum flexibility in lesson planning.  All of the suggestions given above are possible.
The Average Situation:  This is a set-up in which you do not have access to  video facilities for a class to use, but the students must use a laboratory type facility for individual or small group viewing.  In such circumstances, listening  activities may need to be modified to provide students with worksheets of comprehension questions rather than the more class-interactive suggestions  given above.  A model listening lesson in such a situation might involve a  free-write in class to discuss the idea and perhaps some vocabulary preparation.
You will need to ensure that students know how to use the technology.  Students can then go to the lab with a worksheet of questions and watch the tape.  Questions are checked in small groups or in class the next day.  Most of the speaking and listening activities can still be managed without undue difficulty.
The Most Difficult Situation:  This is a situation in which there is no video  access on campus, either in the classroom or in a lab.  Even in this situation, you can still use video.  Possible solutions might involve checking to see if the local public library has video facilities and whether or not a tape can be left on reserve for students.  Another solution is to determine if students in the class have video players at home.  If so, small viewing groups can be organized and groups can check out the video over a period of several nights.

How to Have the Best Possible Video Lesson

You are ready to start.  You have a video, some activities lined up, video access available.  You are excited to try this innovative tool, but maybe you are also just a little scared.  This is normal whenever any type of teaching technology is involved.  Not so many years ago, teachers went to inservices to learn how to use transparency projectors!  To ensure your best possible success with the video, you may want to consider these tips:
Planning is everything.  Cue your video ahead of time, using the counter, a visual cue, and a time cue.  Always keep your video in its case so that nothing can happen to the tape itself.  Watch your video several times before you use it.  The more comfortable you are with the video, the more comfortable your class will be.
Practice with your technology ahead of time.  All VCRs are not the same. Learn how to use yours before you do your first video lesson.  If there is a remote, practice with it.  Feel comfortable with using mute, volume adjustment, tracking, and cueing functions.  Make sure you know where the electrical outlets are in the classroom and be sure you have an extension cord if necessary.
Enlist a student helper.  Students often know more about technology than teachers do.    If something does go wrong, don't hesitate to ask your helper for help.
Any time you are using any type of technology, have an alternate plan.  Electricity does go off.  Tapes have been known to break in the machine. In situations in which the tape is beamed in from a remote station somewhere else on campus, it is possible that someone at the remote station will forget to turn on your tape.   One suggestion is to have a learner's notebook planned and ready at all times.  If something does go wrong, you can use the writing activity and not miss a minute of valuable class time.
Plan your activities in advance.  Will you use small groups?  How will you form them?  Well formed groups are always better than just telling students to turn around and talk to the persons sitting around them.  Will you dictate questions to students or provide them with written copies?  How will you give students directions?  Remember, technology in the classroom
may be even a newer idea for your students than it is for you.    Your students will need clear directions to ensure the best possible experience.

Television news broadcasts are a proven, effective tool to enhance the learning experiences of your students.  As you plan your lessons, you may find some of the   materials listed in the list of references of help in planning your most effective lessons.

References

Addison Wesley. (1996).  Success video magazine:  volumes 1-4.  Boston:  Author.

Alsop, T. (1984).  Planning a radio broadcast -- an opportunity to increase interest in foreign language courses.  Foreign Language Annals, 17 (3), 191-194.

Axelson, E. & Madden, C. (1990) Video-based materials for communicative ITA
training.  IDEAL, 5, 1- 11.

Katchen, J. (1993, April) Turning the tables:  choose the videos, construct the course.  Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Atlanta, GA.

McCrum, R., Cran, W., & MacNeil, R.  (1992)  The story of English.  Viking Penguin: New York.

Mejia, E. (1989, October).  Tuning into the news.  Paper presented at the meeting of the Washington Association for the Education of Speakers of Other Languages, Seattle, WA.

Mejia, E., Kennedy-Xiao, M. & Pasternak, L. (1992).  American picture show: A Cultural Reader.  Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice Hall Regents.

Mejia, E., & O'Connor, F. (1994).  Five star films: an intermediate listening/speaking text.  Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice Hall Regents.

Stempleski, S. (1987, April)  Short takes:  using authentic video in the English class. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Westende, Belgium.

Stempleski, S. &  Arcario, P. (1992).  Video in second language teaching:  using, selecting and producing video for the classroom.   Alexandria:  TESOL Publications.

Stempleski, S. & Tomalin, B. Video in action:  recipes for using video in the language classroom.  Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice Hall Regents. [This has an accompanying video that demonstrates the techniques.]

Tupper, M. (1995).  Writing for radio.  Teaching PreK-8, 26(2), 62-63.

Voice of America (1997, February).  Voice of America 1942-1997:  55 years of
broadcasting excellence.  <gopher://gopher.voa.gov.70/00/README-VOA>

Other Internet Resources of Interest

British Broadcasting Corporation (1997). English language homepage.  This site contains information about the BBC's many ESL/EFL programs and services.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/languages/courses/english.htm

http://cnn.com

http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/index.html

 http://www.phregents.com/techniqu.html

 http://www.wfi.fr/volterre/videoweb.html

http://www.voa.gov