Learning materials from video-clips of student presentations
Not as daunting as it might seem

Y.L. Teresa Ting* and Annamaria Mandoliti
The University of Calabria, Rende (CS) Italy

In this paper, we would like to report how we encouraged language learning by video-taping students as they stuttered, sputtered and yet successfully sounded their thoughts and fears. In particular, their fear of an upcoming exam. Bashful or bold, few would deny the benefits of watching oneself speak. In addition to becoming aware of over-use of discourse markers, videos provide learners of a foreign language with hardcore evidence of their very own language problems and pronunciation pitfalls. Besides, what more authentic a foreign language learning device is there than a video of oneself speaking in that foreign language? Some may question the humaneness of video-taping our learners as they struggle to master the language. The issue is certainly how we teachers can turn such recordings from a potentially embarrassing and confidence-smashing bad thing into a useful series of learning activities which actually go towards building learner autonomy as well as confidence. The second more daunting issue of developing learning material from authentic videos of student presentations is that it can be very time-consuming. Here, we would like to demonstrate that it need not require more time than our usual lesson-planning with more personalised learning material being the undeniably more motivating product.

The context was a group of second-year Italian university students majoring in the Communication Sciences and assigned to at upper-A2/B1 English course which was designed to prepare these students for B1-level certification following 100 hours of frontal instruction (provided by Teresa) and 30 hours of tutoring (provided by Annamaria). Frontal instruction involved the more traditional learning format whereby students, working as a class, or through group-work, master various components of the foreign language (vocabulary, grammar, lexis, syntax etc.). Tutoring was the novelty in that, with Annamaria as an overseeing and informed guide, students received individual attention and learning situations through especially designed EFL computer and video-based materials. This very favourable instructor-tutor co-working situation has been in place at the Language Centre of The University of Calabria since its establishment in 2000 and provides students with a very humanistic learning context since networking in real-time, instructor and tutors can both monitor individual student progress and cater to learning problems immediately. Teamwork certainly facilitated the development of materials and although instructor-tutor teams may not be the norm, collaboration may also be found in the context of teacher-trainee teacher programmes.

Phase I: Defining and Delimiting the topic

Although the idea of video-taping had been brewing in the back of my mind (Teresa), I was inhibited by the belief that video-taping my far-from-fluent speakers would so devastate them that they would never want to speak another word of English. However, knowledge that Annamaria and the students were a little dissatisfied with the stilted standard learning videos plus the antsy classroom atmosphere where exam-anxiety prevailed in Italian the week before the exams, I decided to do it.

Students were given 10 minutes to prepare a 3 minute spiel about
1) why they have chosen to study Communication Sciences
2) what courses they have been following this semester
3) what has been their favourite course of the semester, and why
4) what will probably be in the course exam next week, and why.

Phase II: Transcription of short presentations

The first step involved the transcription of the students' presentations. Although many at this point may scratch any notions of implementing this activity, the transcription of these short and delimited presentations was not as tedious as we ourselves had originally feared. In fact, as each student produced no more than 7 sentences so transcribing was not time-consuming at all, taking no more than 5 minutes per presentation. In addition, students also said very similar things as they had rigorous guidelines to delimit the content of their presentation - this facilitated transcription since the range of vocabulary was predictable and contained. Although between-student redundancy may be a drawback if one hoped to learn from watching all the videos, it does not pose a problem in this context as students were asked to view only their own clips. Finally, we just found it so interesting to actually dissect what students say - was that mumble-jumble the auxiliary before the V-ing form or does this student still not know they need 'to be'?

Here are the actual transcripts of two presentations:

Phase III: Developing learning materials

For each student, four sets of learning material were developed from their individual presentations.

Activity 1A: Pre-listening "Cloze-in-on-your-language"
This pre-viewing activity asked students to "cloze-in" on their own good language. The cloze-activity was actually based on the students' own presentation from which their original erroneous language was actually blanked out. They were not expected to remember exactly what they had said but, with what language they knew, were asked to complete the transcription. Such "closing-in" on their own transcripts gave students an opportunity to actually produce the correct language in writing, solidifying their language knowledge before facing the mistakes they then witnessed in their own videos. The following activity was thus developed from the two presentations illustrated above:

Once they had completed their texts, students were instructed to ask Annamaria for their video (Activity 1B).

Activity 2: self-correction and lexis-building
Students were given a complete transcript of their presentation and given the instruction: "This is what you said - correct yourself." Below the text, the lexis-building note provided corrections or alternatives to erroneous utterances found in each student's presentation with the instruction: "NOTICE! Here are some useful alternatives." Michele and Stella received the respective suggestions:

Activity 3: targeted grammar and was entitled "Let's correct together.
" We bracketed multiple-choice options into the transcripts to highlight grammatical and lexical errors that the students made. As illustrated below, this was not a true multiple choice 'test' per se as it was clear that the correct choice was the alternative to what the student had actually said.

This basically provided students with teacher-feedback correction of what they had said, without the presence of the teacher but requiring a little more thinking than just a glance through the red ink. Students were then instructed to "Ask Annamaria to check you!" As only one tutor is available at any one time at the Language Centre, presenting students with corrections in this way also made more efficient and effective use of Annamaria's time.

The asterixes were inserted to refer students to a grammar footnote on the use of simple future and the 'going to' future form. This had only just been covered in class and this video-viewing proved an opportune time for students to review this new item. In fact, as all the students had to foresee the contents of their upcoming exam, they all received the same footnote which read:

Activity 4: dealt with the other very challenging component of the English language
for Italian learners: forming the interrogative form since the affirmative and interrogative are invariable in Italian, with the interrogative markers being a change in intonation when speaking and the question mark when writing. Students were given the following instructions: "You are a VIP (Very Important Person) and you are interviewed! Here are YOUR answers, but what are the interviewer's questions?" This was followed by five very short answers which were based on each students presentation. Again delimiting the context of each presentation made the making of this activity also relatively time-efficient as the first three questions of this activity remained the same for all the students with the last two being more reflective of what individual students said. For example, for Michele, the activity consisted of the following questions: