Video

What and why?

In general, students find the use of videos motivating and stimulating. Videos are a useful vehicle for learning more about a topic, for making cross-cultural comparisons and for making the language more memorable. CEWw is accompanied by a set of videos. These can be used together with the coursebooks or on their own. The videos are not intended simply to provide 'language models'. They aim to enrich the students' knowledge and experience of language use in relation to the topics in the course by providing interesting extension material for each of the six Themes at each level of the course. See the video packs themselves for further details of the videos and accompanying worksheets. The following notes apply to the use of videos in general. (There are also further general ideas with the video booklets.)

Practical ideas

• Plan ahead! Book the video player and the video cassette. Check if a technician will be available. Watch the video and read through the video script before the lesson so that you are aware of the language, characters, topic and content.
• Prepare the students before they see the video so that they have an idea of what they are going to see. Give them a general outline of what they will see. This will make it much easier for them to follow and learn.
• You can set some tasks before the students watch the video. These can be of a general nature, about what happens in the video. After the students have watched the extract from the video all the way through, you can follow this up with further detailed tasks which require the students to listen or look for detail.
• Tip: When you start the cassette put the counter on zero so that when you rewind and replay you will find the place more easily.
• Tip: Make sure that all the students can see the screen and hear.
• Keep the video session fairly short. Ten minutes of video every week is more useful than 40 minutes every month.

Some ideas for exploiting videos:

• Play the video the first time without any sound. Ask the students what they think the people are saying.
• Students can watch the section all the way through. Rewind, then play a part again. Then freeze the frame and ask them if they can remember what comes next.
• Observation: the students can do this in teams. Give them a list of items before the viewing. They have to write down who had or did them, e.g. 'Who had a red car?', 'Who had glasses?', 'Who did Peter talk to?', etc.
• After viewing the video extract once, students can work in groups to write questions for each other. They can then exchange these and watch the video again to find the answers.
• Talk about cross-cultural aspects. Ask students to write down after the viewing four things they noticed which were different from their culture (objects, buildings, clothes, food, etc.) and four things which were the same. Put them on the board. Discuss why the things are the same or different.
• In advance, choose some sentences from the video script and ask students what they think the video will be about, what they will learn about and so on. They can also guess who says the sentences, why, etc.
• Students can also be involved in making their own videos.