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
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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)
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Research Related to Listening
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Research on listening and reading comprehension
Factors that affect listening comprehension
Research on listener characteristics
Authentic materials in listening research
Video in listening research
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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:
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Text Characteristics (variations in listening passage/text or associated
visual support)
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Interlocutor Characteristics (variations in the speaker’s personal
characteristics)
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Listener Characteristics (variations in the listener’s personal
characteristics)
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Process Characteristics (variations in the listener’s cognitive activities
and in the nature of interaction between speaker and listener)
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Task characteristics (variations in the purpose for listening and
associated responses)
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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)
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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)
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Video in Listening Research
Rivers (1975) reported data on how adults spend their
communicative time:
40%-50%
listening
25%-30%
speaking
11%-16%
reading
9%
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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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Fewer normal pauses, hesitations, corrections, paraphrase
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Diminished word or even sentence boundaries
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Reduction of vowels and assimilation of consonants
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Input is rehearsed and read (vs. produced spontaneously)
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Written language is delivered via an audio-visual medium
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Interviews are prepared and edited, thus merely resemble natural discourse
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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
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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
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Factors that Affect Listening
Comprehension as Found in
SCOLA Newscasts
L2 viewers may:
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Experience a comprehension shock from non-interactive speech flow
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Find it difficult to filter out less important items
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Exhibit frustration, or give up when speech is too fast
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Get tired of watching mundane news
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Find news boring for the lack of relevance to their own experiences
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Disengage from listening and just keep watching
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Post Viewing
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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
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Reduce anxiety of confronting the unknown
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Previewing:
Examples of Tasks
Facilitation of deductive reasoning and predictions:
• Providing cultural information via ancillary materials and cultural
commentaries
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Playing the synopsis of the upcoming news, when possible
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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
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come up in the video text
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Flexible learning environments compatible with developing
technologies
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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: iskold@muhlenberg.edu
http://www.muhlenberg.edu/depts/forlang/LLC/iskold_home/index.htm
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