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COPYRIGHT 2002 Universidad de Costa Rica
During the last few years, there has been a remarkable change of attitude among language teachers toward the importance of emphasizing listening comprehension and speaking in the second language classroom. As Riggenbach and Lazaraton state,
Today, language students are considered successful if they can communicate effectively in their second or foreign language, whereas two decades ago the accuracy of the language produced would most likely be the major criterion contributing to the judgments of a student's success or lack of success. There is little doubt that these developments in language teaching--called the "proficiency movement" by some and the promotion of "functional" or "communicative" ability by others--have moved us away from the goal of accurate form toward a focus on fluency and communicative effectiveness. (1991, p. 125)
Learning a language involves the integration and manipulation of many skills, but mainly those regarding listening and speaking, which play an active and important part in the communication process. The increased emphasis on communicative teaching has lately made the listening and speaking skills a target of growing attention. They are no longer considered passive skills, but vital components that must be mastered in language learning.
During the last decades, the use of technical innovations, such as television, computers, and audio-tapes, have become widespread in professional fields, and of course, education has not been an exception. One of these innovations is video, which facilitates many aspects of second language teaching. According to Silva (1983) "unlike written dialogues, and even audio recordings, video tape is capable of capturing a communicative act in its entirety" (p. 3). All the images, nonverbal communication and actions shown in a video segment can communicate and provoke reactions in many ways. This medium thus provides an excellent means for the presentation, analysis, and discussion of oral discourse; that is, the real language intended for native speakers, ungraded, unsimplified, and spoken at a normal pace and in typical accents containing idioms and expressions common in contemporary English-speaking environments. (Stempleski, 1987, p. 7).
The fact that students need exposure to the second language has led teachers to incorporate and use such technical innovations in class. Certainly, teachers need to bridge the gap between the language heard in the foreign language classroom and the real language spoken by native speakers. Indeed, David Wood (1995) believes that "the kinds of general problems confronting the EFL teacher in particular can be helped by video when there is limited contact with those whose first language is English" (p. 2). The problem is that in the excitement of experimenting with a relatively new medium, there is a tendency for video users to lose sight of language teaching objectives and of students' learning objectives. Some teachers do not have a clear idea of how to use video in the EFL classroom and the class time ends up in passive picture watching.
This article, the first in a series of 3 articles on video to be published, intends to guide the reader to use video as an interesting and helpful tool in an EFL classroom. It will present the advantages and disadvantages of using video and the kinds of video material language teachers can have access to when using video as a teaching tool. A second publication will deal with video material selection, preparation and presentation and the third article will address the issue of authentic versus non-authentic video material.
It is essential to go back in time and do a brief review of the different teaching...
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