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Video and languagecomprehensionlain MacWilliam

Although recent yea rs have seen an increasing volume of literature aboutvideo and language teaching, there has realty been very little research intothe suitability and effectiveness of the medium for this purpose. However,there have been studies in other fields, notably ed ucational broadcas tingresearch and communication studies, which, though set in the domain offirst-language acquisition and comprehension, may have relevance forforeign-language teaching. This article identifies those research findingsand obs ervations which have a bearing on the com prehensibility of videowhen used for language input, and, in particular, the relationship betwee nthe aural and visual channels. The implications for future developmen t arebriefly discussed.There is currently a lot being written about video in the language class-room, but most of it seems anecdotal or takes the form of generalizedobservation. Doubtless the '1,001 Uses of Video' compendium will alwaysneed updating, but there can be very few practising (and journal-reading)teachers with access to video who still need to be told that 'video placeslanguage in context' or who are as yet u naware of the virtues of the freeze-frame button. With one or two notable exceptions, no one appears to beconsidering one of the main questions arising from the widespread adop-tion of video as a language teaching aid, namely: how effective is the videomedium as a source of language input to the foreign-language learner?The question 'how effective', of course, presupposes a qualitativemeasure of some sort, and one of the more obvious explanations of theomission noted here is that there has been practically no recorded researchinto language learning from video. It m ay be that the extensive use of off-airbroadcasts has inhibited would-be investigators; copyright law makes noconcession even to the most altruistic pirates. On the other hand, the ELTprofession, and in particular its British branch, has tended to eschewempirical research into the effectiveness of approaches and methodologies,preferring instead to rely on the solipsism known as 'construct validity' forits measure of pedagogical approval. Th e absence of data , then, is hardly anovel phenomenon in English language teaching.

Fortunately, the use of video for educational purposes has not beenconfined tothosc working in language teaching, and the purpose of thisarticle is to consider some of the relevant research findings and obser-vations from otherfields,notably educational broadcasting and communi-cation stud ies. The fact tha t these largely derive from first-lan guag econtexts need not wholly detract from their importance to the domain ofsecond-language learning. The principal concern is with the use of'auth en-tic' video materialin the main, recorded televisionrather than withEL TJournal Volume 4012 April 1986 Oxford University Press 1986 131

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materials specially contrived for language-teaching purposes or with theuse of video for the recording and monitoring of student and teacherperformance.

Central to any consideration of language input is the notion ofcotnprehen-sibility. In the sense that Krashen and others have used the term, com-prehensibility of input is usually seen to depend on various language-basedcriteria such as communicative complexity, discourse type, and so forth.The concept of 'relative difficulty' for the learner is usually described inlinguistic terms, quite righdy if language is the goal of the learner. But thequest ion ar ises: does video, particularly in its authentic form, introduce any addi-tional actors which may, in some way, inhibit its usefulness as a language-teaching aid?T h e r e is some reason to believe that this indeed may be so.In a recent article, Eunice Fisher of the Open Universi ty ca lled intoquestion some of the assumptions made about te levision as a pedagogicala id to the (first) language develop men t of you ng children. In particular, shefocused on the relationship between the kinds of information presentedsimultaneously through the aural and visual channels, posing the followingques t ion :

. . . let us imagine a small child who, for reasons which may be social,cognitive or a combination of both, is not a competent language user . Ifsuch a child watches a programme in which the speech is largely redun-d a n t . .. will this child(i) process the visual and linguistic information, achieve some sort ofcognit ive matching and strengthen any shortcomings in the linguis-t ic mode by using visual information, or(ii) avoid the effort of processing linguistically ... and concentra te onmaking sense of the visual information? (Fisher 1984:88)Fisher , who labels these 'complement ' and 'conflict ' processing modelsrespectively, goes on to cite a num ber of audior i t ies who tend to support theview that younger children, i.e. less competent language users, do findconflict between information presented in linguistic and visual modes.Donaldson's view that 'it is the linguistic mode which is ignored where achoice must be ma de' (D onald son 1976) is one that finds resonances in thework of others working in educational television research bodi in Britainand the USA (see Vem on 1953; Mielke and C h e n in Howe 1983) .

Th e similar i ty implied here between adult second-language learning andfirst-language acquisition amo ng young children is, of course, open toques t ion , but the analogy is one frequendy invoked (or implied) by thosework ing in other areas of linguistic analysis, notably interlanguage studiesand second-language acquisi t ion. However , the problem of competingaura l and visual channels does not appea r to be one confined to youngchi ldren .In a series of exper iments on comprehension across different media(Tren ama n 1967), some evidence emerged that increased visual movem enton te levision programmes had a detrimental effect on the comprehensionscores of test subjects classed in the 'unskil led ' job category (for which,perhaps, read 'restricted code user '?). More recently, in a series of experi-me n t s at North-East London Polytechnic (Gunter 1980) , an attempt wasm a d e to measure the re tention of information presented in three types oftelevision news broadcast.1 In these experiments, three different visualformats were compared:

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'talking head'newsreader only'talking head' interspersed with still pictures'talking head' introduction followed by motion pictures.In all formats the spoken commentary remained the same. The researchfinding was tha t there w as a greater loss of information by test subjects fromnews stories accompanied by picture materials than from those presentedby the newsread er alone . A similar conclusion, that the visible presence of aspeaker enhanced aural comprehension, had also been reached by thepsychologist M . D. Ve mo n in a series of experiments con ducted in the early1950s (Vernon 1953).Th e preoccu pation of all of the researchers quoted here ha s been with theloss of information presented via the aural channel, i .e. spoken langu age,when acco mpan ied by visual information of a non-linguistic nature . The reis no suggestion tha t p aralinguistic features, for example, or sub-titling 2 areanything but supportive of speech comprehension. The general positiontaken here is the one taken by Severin in what he termed 'Cue SummationTheory' , which states:

Irrelevant cues in the audio or visual channels will cause a loss oflearning from either channel, but additional cues in either channel willlead to greater overall learning. (Severin 1968)More or less the same conclusion was reached by those engaged in theSchools Television Research Project (reported on in Kemelfield 1969).W hat are the implications of such research for the use of video in foreign-languag e teaching? Certainly it will make one approac h with caution someof the larger claims made on behalf of the medium, such as 'The videostimulus also greatly improves the level of retention of teaching items in thestudents' memories' (RSA 1980:41-2). More particularly, it might prompta re-examination of the use of certain types of video, especially thosederiving from off-air sources. For example, widespread use is made ofdocumentary-style programmes in which voice-over commentary is oftenthe major auditory input. Indeed, probably on account of their topic-relatedness and generally 'serious' content, it may well be that such pro-gram mes represent a high p roportion of video stock in current use. It is truethat this kind of material is often valued for its 'information' content ratherthan linguistic content, or as a stimulus to post-viewing discussion ac tivi-ties and the like, but very often it is presented as listening or 'viewingcomprehension' input. For all but the more advanced learners this mayresult in a lot of viewing and little comprehensionat a linguistic level, atleast. On the other hand, the more convergent audio and visual strands ofsomething like the soap opera Coronation Street, though less obviously'respec table' in terms of content, m ay prove m ore supportive to the Englishlanguage learner.3

A problem related to that which has been described above concernsvideo text length. In a fairly recent survey of video use in EFL establish-ments (M cK night 1981), it was found that the average length of classroomviewing sessions was between thirty an d forty m inutes, and tha t hardly anywere less than twenty m inutes in length, even for elementary-level g roups.Since broadcast television itself rarely works in units of less than half anhour, these figures are hardly surprising. More recently, there have beencalls for shorter units for language-teaching exploitation (Potter 1982;V ideo and language comprehension 13 3

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Pilbeam 1984) and, increasingly, ELT-specific materials have reflected thisneed (see M acmillan's Video English, for example). The main reason for thisappea rs to have been a desire for m aterial which could be more intensivelyexploited. But the re is another good reason for working with sho rter videotexts.In an early series of experim ents on the retention of information frombroadcast television (Vernon 1953), it was found that there was a steepdecline in the amoun t of aural information retained d uring the course of ahalf-hour transm ission, an d, from this research, it was felt that between sixand seven minutes was the optimal maximum for native-speaking viewers.One can only assume that, if the main aim in using a video text in theforeign-language classroom is language comprehension (and it may not be,of course), anything longer than this will be a relatively less efficient use ofthe resource by the learner.If the research and observations noted here do have relevance for foreign-language learnin g, then clearly the video resources presently available arefar from adequ ate. T he curren t choice of'auth enti c' television or simplifiedseries leaves a very large gap, especially for the intermediate range oflearners. In the same way that manage ment-training interests have devisedmaterials specifically to meet their training needsand have not, say,relied on scenes from Dallas to illustrate boardroom communication strat-egiesit should be possible for the language-teaching profession to createvideo which is both a uthen tic, in the sense that the language is not artifici-ally constrained, and, at the same time, amenable to exploitation forlanguage-teaching purposes. Quite apart from the practical advantages tobe won, it would go some way to dispelling the notion that anythingappearing on a video screen must be 'good television'. However, if alter-native criteria of design and use are to be adopted, they should be based onan understanding of the salient characteristics of the medium and ofthe learne r's response to it, and little progress will be made towards eitherof these aims without a more rigorous, research-based approach to itsuse. Received December 1984

Not Fisher, E. 1984. 'Television and language develop-1 It may be that television news presents a special merit.' Journal ofEducational Television 10/2:85-90 .problem for viewers. In a study by Nordstreng Glasgow Media Group. 1976. Bad News. London:(quoted in Glasgow Media Group 1976), just under Routledge and Kegan Paul.half of a samp le of Finnish viewers questioned abo ut Gunter, B. 1980. 'Remembering televised news:the content of television news prog ram me s imme- effects of visual format on information gain .' Journaldiately after they had been transmitted could not of Educational Television 6:8-11.remember a single i tem of news, even when given Ho we, M. J. (ed.) 1983. Learning rom Television: Psycho-helpful prompts by the questioners! logical an d Educational Research. London: Academic2 An interesting account of a study concerning one Press.particular use of subtitles is to be found in Lambert Kemelfield, G. 1969. 'Progress report of the Schoolsttal. (1981). Television Resea rch Projec t.' Pa rt II in Educational3 For some fascinating insight into the relationship Television International 3/3 .between sound and vision in British soap operas, see Lambert, W. E., I. Boehler, an d N. S idot i . 1981.Wa tt (1983). 'Choosing the languages of subtides and spokendialogues for media presentations: implications forsecond language edu cation. ' Applied Psycholinguistics

RmUnncm* 2:133-48.Don al d son , M , 1976. Children's M inds. London: M cKn i gh t ,F . 1981. 'Uses ofVideo in TEFL.' Univer-Fonta na. sity of Wales: unpublished M .Ed, thesis.134 Iain MacWiUiam

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Pi lbeam, A. 1984. 'Time ripe for a new type of video.'EFL Gazette, October 1984.Potter, M. 1982. 'Video as a classroom resource. ' EF LGazette, September 1982.Royal Society of Arts . 1980. RS A Cert. TEFL Courses:1980 Conference Report. London: T he R oyal Society ofArts .Severin , W. 1968. Cut Summation in MultipU ChannelCommunication. Madison: University of Wisconsin.Trenaman, J. M. 1967. Communication and Comprehen-sion. London: Longman.Vernon, M. D. 1953. 'Perception and understan dingof instructional television'. British Journal of Psychol-ogy XL IV: 116-26.

Watt, J. 1983. 'British soap.' Teaching English 17/1 :26-31 .

ThmmuthorIain MacWilliam has taught EFL in Lebanon,Belgium, and the Netherlands, where he served asBritish Council Director of Studies for three years. Forthe past four years, he has worked at the Institute forApplied Language Studies, University of Edinburgh,where, among other things, he has been involved in thedevelopment of home-produced video materials forlanguage comprehension purposes.

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