In general, new generations are more visually orientated than ever before. In other words, they are used to listening and seeing things at the same time. As a result, using video in the language classroom is both useful and necessary and that is why more and more coursebooks include videos as a component. Cambridge English for Schools is no exception. The question then is how to best exploit the video? There are many more ways than just asking questions. Here are two examples:

Vocabulary

Video can be used for the presentation and review of lexical items in a variety of ways. For instance, in the video Welcome to English, sequence 5, students in a home economics classroom are trying to guess the ingredients of pancakes.

• Previewing activity: write the word breakfast in the middle of the board and check that students know its meaning. Ask them to shout out what they eat for breakfast and write the words around it. Once some nine or ten words are on the board, ask them to organise them in groups under headings such as animal, mineral and vegetable origin.

• Task: The task is to listen and check what words they mention. First, play the introduction with the sound on up to where James says ÔÉ but do you know whatÕs in them?Õ Stop the video and turn off the sound. Hand out the task below. Play the tape. As soon as the fourth student talks, pause the video. Give students time to try and guess which words they mentioned and play the tape again, this time with sound.

Task

Four students are giving the ingredients of pancakes. Work in pairs. Guess, without sound, which ingredients they mention as in the example.

Now watch the same segment with sound and see how many you guessed correctly.

Grammar

Recent studies of how languages are learned suggest what many teachers already knew, that the teaching of grammar is important. A focus on form, as opposed to formS (Long and Robinson 1998), has been advocated as the way grammar teaching should be carried out. This implies the use of tasks in which noticing, as used by Schmidt (1993), is central. In other words, tasks should promote detection plus the noticing of a given language feature. The following task is an example of this. It focuses on likes and dislikes and is meant to be used with sequence 5 of Welcome to English as above; the segment right after a student says: ÔYes, itÕs quite small, and itÕs a bit lumpy!Õ Students match the halves of the sentences before the segment is shown to them, then they check by watching it. The objective is to match the halves by looking not only at meaning but also by noticing how sentences are syntactically formed.

Task

Draw a line to match the halves of the sentences as in the example. Watch the video to check your answers. Compare with a partner.

REFERENCES:
Long, M. and Robinson, P. (1998) Focus on form: Theory, research, and practice from Dougthy, C. and Williams, J. (eds.) (1998)
Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition Cambridge University Press Schmidt, R. (1993)
Awareness and second language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 13, 206-226 Cambridge University Press

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