| Questions to consider |
|---|
| What relationships do you see between the concept of multiliteracies and video-viewing listening? |
| In what ways do you think the digitization of videotexts might change the listening-viewing experience? |
| Can you think of the kinds of challenges videotexts might present to listener-viewers, especially in relation to multimodal patterns of meaning? |
| What challenges do you foresee in developing and implementing videotext-based lessons in your FL classroom? |
• videotext
• video-mediated listening
• multimodality
• visual literacy
Videotexts have played a central role in FL teaching for almost three decades. No beginning or intermediate FL textbook today is published without videotexts, albeit typically of a simulated type, as part of its ancillary package. Due to “technological, pedagogical and sociological factors” (Kaiser, 2011, p. 232), it has taken time for authentic videotexts to make some inroads in the lower-level FL curriculum. Further, many FL instructors continue to have reservations regarding the appropriateness of authentic videotexts for lower-level learners with low language ability overall.
However, changes are rapidly taking place due in no small part due to increased access to a wide range of videotexts on the Internet and, more specifically, video-sharing web sites such as Daily Motion, Hulu, Vimeo, or YouTube. Not only is access to authentic videotexts increasingly easier, but the report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages (2007) identified them as one important resource for challenging “students’ imaginations and [helping] them consider alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding things” and teaching them “differences in meaning, mentality, and worldview as expressed in American English and in the target language” (p. 4) and urged FL teachers to make use of them and expand their use beyond that of preparing learners for subsequent oral tasks or supporting the learning of lexicon-grammatical forms.
As indicated in other modules, interaction and interpretation of authentic texts, including videotexts, should not be reserved for advanced FL learners only. Beginning FL learners can also engage in designing the meaning of authentic texts and the multiliteracies framework examined throughout these modules provides the tools to design video-mediated listening activities that are accessible to them.
You might wonder why we chose the word videotext rather than video for this module. Reading or hearing the word videotext directs our attention to the “textual” elements and literacy practices of the medium and not the technology of the medium, namely its ability to dynamically combine visual and audio elements in a connected sequence. It is Elizabeth Joiner who, in 1990, first coined the term videotext as she argued that video is “as deserving of the label text as is a written document” (p. 54). We should engage with a videotext in much the same way we engage with a written text, namely we sh