CALICO 2007 ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM

The Many (Inter)Faces of CALL Texas State University, San Marcos, TX May 22-26, 2007

Online Video Streams: Theoretical and Practical Considerations of Using Newscasts

Luba Iskold, Ed. D.

Muhlenberg College Allentown, PA 1

Background Information

Theoretical Foundations of Second Language Acquisition

• Comprehension-based approaches (Krashen, 1985-1990; Terrel, 1986) • Cognitive-theoretical view of language acquisition (O’Mally & Chomat, 1993) • Sociocultural approaches to language learning based on a more general sociocultural theory proposed by Vygotsky (1962, 1978) 2

Research Related to Listening

• Research on listening and reading comprehension • Factors that affect listening comprehension • Research on listener characteristics • Authentic materials in listening research • Video in listening research 3

• • • • •

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension

How do listeners integrate phonologic, syntactic, lexical, and sociolinguistic information?

According to Rubin (1994), the following factors affect listening comprehension: Text Characteristics (variations in listening passage/text or associated visual support) Interlocutor Characteristics (variations in the speaker’s personal characteristics) Listener Characteristics (variations in the listener’s personal characteristics) Process Characteristics (variations in the listener’s cognitive activities and in the nature of interaction between speaker and listener) Task characteristics (variations in the purpose for listening and associated responses) 4

Authentic Discourse

Geddes and White (1979) draw a distinction between the types of authentic discourse:

Unmodified authentic discourse

, a genuine act of communication

Simulated authentic discourse

, a discourse for pedagogical purposes, but at the same time exhibits features that have a high probability of occurrence in genuine acts of communication (p. 130) 5

Textbooks and curricular materials:

• Are very useful, but insufficient for bring the target culture to students • Are frequently created to introduce specific linguistic structures • Present scripts produced solely for student consumption • Solicit answers to artificial, unauthentic questions Authentic texts play an important role at

all levels of language learning:

Bacon, 1992; Byrnes, 1984; Eykyn, 1992; Herron, 1994; Joiner, 1991; Omaggio Hadley, 1993a; Richards, 1983; Thompson and Rubin, 1996; VanPatten, 1989) 6

Video in Listening Research

Rivers (1975) reported data on how adults spend their communicative time: 40%-50% listening 25%-30% 11%-16% 9% speaking reading writing In our “media saturated” world students are “increasingly expected to obtain information from oral rather than written sources” (Joiner et al., 1989, p.427) 7

Newscasts as a Source of Authentic Videotext

• Nearly essential consumer product • Major resource for information gathering, similar to newspapers • Significant source of authentic language, particularly rich in cognates • Available on the Internet in overflowing supply • Provide information on current matters of interest in the target country • Present paralinguistic information, including manners, gesture, and speaking styles • Allow viewers to see a country the way that country sees itself 8

Why use SCOLA Newscasts?

• SCOLA introduces regularly scheduled newscasts • Includes game shows, talk shows, feature films, and cultural programming from selected regions • An archive of the past week’s programming allows choosing from a variety of materials • Materials are immediately available via the Internet • News episodes are relatively brief (2-3min.) and are easily identifiable • Programming is commercial-free • It is easy to point students to a specific episode 9

Why use SCOLA Newscasts?

• Users do not have to surf the Internet to find the assigned video • SCOLA grants copyright permission to use materials in class and for research purposes • Learner control of the video input accommodates for individual differences and learning styles: Students may watch the video as many times as needed Students may control their path through the video by pausing and replaying specific segments of each episode Such flexibility is likely to reduce anxiety and make video viewing more enjoyable than classroom group video viewing 10

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension as Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Text Characteristics:

• Unmodified authentic discourse: Texts are produced by native speakers and for native speakers • Dry, monotonous monologues delivered by “talking heads” with little visual support • Subject matter unfamiliar to students • Long sentences with complex relative clauses • Sophisticated, frequently unfamiliar vocabulary • Figurative expressions, including idioms and metaphors 11

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension as Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Speech (Interlocutor) Characteristics: • • • • • • News anchors and reporters express meaning efficiently, thus speech is characterized by: Fewer normal pauses, hesitations, corrections, paraphrase Diminished word or even sentence boundaries Reduction of vowels and assimilation of consonants Input is rehearsed and read (vs. produced spontaneously) Written language is delivered via an audio-visual medium Interviews are prepared and edited, thus merely resemble natural discourse 12

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension as Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Listener Characteristics:

Most students at the Intermediate level have had little prior exposure to unmodified authentic discourse L2 viewers have imperfect control of linguistic code L2 viewers exhibit low tolerance for information gaps 13

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension as Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Process Characteristics :

By nature, newscasts are a one-way medium Negotiation of meaning is absent from discourse Viewers carry out a passive, receptive role 14

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension as Found in SCOLA Newscasts

L2 viewers may:

• Experience a comprehension shock from non-interactive speech flow • Find it difficult to filter out less important items • Exhibit frustration, or give up when speech is too fast • Get tired of watching mundane news • Find news boring for the lack of relevance to their own experiences • Disengage from listening and just keep watching 15

Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension as Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Task Characteristics: Ancillary Materials Provided by SCOLA Pros:

Insta-Class is an excellent addition to SCOLA Provides weekly English translations for one news episode Provides weekly comprehension questions for that same episode

Cons:

Materials created by SCOLA developers are limited in quantity and variety Seem appropriate for classroom environment only Need substantial reworking to be completed online 16

Instructional Challenges:

• Adapting the broadcasts to the learning needs of students with various proficiency levels • Adapting material to instructional goals:

Listening to Learn

vs.

Learning to Listen

(Lund, 1991) 17

Instructional Challenges:

Listening to Learn -

video as a vehicle to other skills, an integrated approach Video provides a starting point for work on

productive skills

: vocabulary development structural analysis conversation analytical writing

Instructional Objective:

Creating activities to cultivate productive skills 18

Instructional Challenges:

Learning to Listen -

skill acquisition for comprehension Purely

receptive

approach that involves the teaching of listening strategies

Instructional Objectives:

Creating activities to cultivate listening skills for structural and sociocultural comprehension Assisting viewers with comprehension of unmodified authentic discourse 19

Instructional Challenges:

Why is it time-consuming and difficult ?

• Matching the difficulty of the task to the level of students’ proficiency • Preparing various types of activities, to keep students interested • Identifying timely topics with significant shelf life • Finding relevant materials to complement video segments (e.g., newspaper article, cultural commentaries, Internet links, etc.) • Developing web-based activities for languages with non-Roman alphabets 20

Designing Tasks for Video Viewing

The concept of helping students to develop their listening skills through specific strategies has emerged in the past fifteen years: • Applying to L2 successful techniques and strategies used for teaching receptive skills in the L1 (Bernhardt & James, 1987; Byrnes, 1984; Dunkel, 1986) • Adapting to listening instructional reading models • Richards (1983) suggested manipulation of two variables: the input and the task (pp. 227-229) INPUT  MICRO-SKILLS  TASKS • His taxonomy includes 33 micro-skills for listening 21

Adapting Tasks vs.

Adapting Texts

Language of instruction:

• L1 questions and tasks may be used to check comprehension • L2 questions may provide cues for comprehension, and assist with teaching specific linguistic aspects of videotext

Activities & Tasks:

Previewing • Viewing • Post Viewing 22

Previewing

Objectives:

• Elicit students’ background knowledge • Identify students’ previous experiences • Generate a meaningful framework for further development of comprehension • Generate a meaningful framework for further development of linguistic skills • Reduce anxiety of confronting the unknown 23

Previewing: Examples of Tasks

Facilitation of deductive reasoning and predictions:

• • Providing cultural information via ancillary materials and cultural commentaries Playing the synopsis of the upcoming news, when possible • Watching the video without sound: making inferences/deductive reasoning, based on visual cues • Discussing still shots from the video • Generating L1 and/or L2 questions guiding toward comprehension • Generating a list of key words germane to the topic (in English) • Looking up L2 equivalents for 8-10 key words to check if they would come up in the video text 24

Video Viewing

Low-production Activities & Tasks:

• Scaffolding, assisting with comprehension of lexical items: (e.g., add subtitles, or full scripts, then steadily withdraw help as the semester progresses) • Identifying main ideas, characters, places (multiple choice) • Focusing attention on particular features of the videotext • Scanning the videotext for specific information 25

Video Viewing

Item format: multiple choice, or T/F:

• Recognizing vocabulary • Identifying cognates • Conducting grammar observations • Testing hypotheses • Classifying statements (T/F) • Determining intonation patterns 26

Post Viewing

High Production Skills:

Tasks that bring the language of the video into active use

: • Recall, recognition, and application exercises • Comparing findings with other students in the group • Naming the topics covered in the video • Discussing how the topics treated correspond to anticipations from experiencing L1 news 27

Post Viewing

Facilitating retention of linguistic items processed during video viewing

: • Cloze exercises for active vocabulary development • Paragraph-level oral and written summaries • Examination of acronyms (practice saying; explain the meaning)

Fostering critical thinking and students’ analytical skills:

• Comparing relative place of importance of specific news in the L1 and L2 newscasts • Compare L1 and L2 stories for content and approach • Express your opinion about the event 28

Conclusion

Select:

• Most interesting materials with lots of visual support • Topics that learners are most likely to understand • Topics about which students have some background knowledge from reading newspapers and watching L1 TV 29

Conclusion

Encourage students to:

• Check out online news sites in English, such as CNN or Reuters • Look for similarities/differences in international news coverage • Compare the coverage, including categories of news and order of presentation 30

Conclusion

Avoid

• Cognitive overload • Task overload • Long video episodes, exceeding 3 min. in length

Provide

• Comprehension checks to sustain high degree of concentration • Parallel texts for reading (full text, captions, key words) • More viewing sessions of fewer discrete episodes • Class time and screen space for note taking 31

Conclusion

Develop • Ancillary materials that are likely to have considerable shelf life: Recent History, Ecology, Health, etc.

• Materials on L2 cultures reporting about American life (takes away from authenticity) • Multi-skill tasks, ranging from Novice to Intermediate High Level: from basic comprehension of names, places and numbers gradually moving on to using video as a vehicle to other skills • Flexible learning environments compatible with developing technologies • • • Developing quality ancillary materials appears excessive for individual faculty. Team effort is more likely to be successful.

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Contact Information:

Dr. Luba Iskold

2400 Chew Street Muhlenberg College, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Allentown, PA 18104 Phone: 484-664-3516 Fax: 484-664-3722

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.muhlenberg.edu/depts/forlang/LLC/iskold_home/index.htm

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