Authentic Interactive Video for Lower-Level Spanish at the United States Naval Academy¹⁵⁴

U. S. Naval Academy

By the fortunate coincidence of necessity and opportunity, the Language Studies Department at the U. S. Naval Academy became involved in interactive video (IAV)¹⁵⁵. In 1984 our alumni association funded a satellite earth station providing authentic broadcast video in a variety of languages. Soon we discovered that most of the programming received was beyond the linguistic reach of all but our most advanced students. Just as we began to despair about exploiting our new dish antenna fully, the Academy began funding projects to incorporate computer-assisted instruction into the curriculum. Adding computer-controlled interactivity to the authentic video which we receive has proved an ideal means of making foreign-language materials accessible to our students from their very first week of instruction.

Most laymen envision IAV only in its flashiest form: simulations with various possible outcomes depending on the choices made by users. For various practical and theoretical reasons, however, my colleagues and I chose to avoid this participant mode and opted for an observer mode. Although both approaches clearly deserve a place in language learning, for our purposes the observer mode offers significant long-term advantages over its «sexier» sibling. Foremost, from the authors' standpoint, is increased lesson production: because situations with a linear design require far less extensive planning than simulations with multiple outcomes, many more promising projects can emerge from the development stage. In addition, learners appreciate the clearly defined, concrete learning objectives and the predictability of presentation and tasks which the observer mode makes possible.

At the Naval Academy, foreign-language enrollment is concentrated in first- and second year classes, which meet three times a week for 50 minutes. Our overall pedagogical approach has benefitted from recent research showing that the most effective instructional strategies first emphasize the receptive skills -listening, reading- before building the productive skills -speaking, writing¹⁵⁶. We have a strong bias toward building proficiency (i. e., the ability to apply linguistic knowledge and communicative strategies in order to understand and produce coherent spoken or written discourse in the foreign language) over achievement (i. e., mastery of a specific inventory of words and structures). Our IAV lessons are designed to build listening comprehension skills with authentic video, that is, with television programs produced by and intended for native speakers of the language. Our term «authentic IAV» stands for computer-assisted instruction based on such broadcast materials. Ultimately we intend to incorporate interactive video into all our language courses; but, in support of a long-term study of the effectiveness of IAV described below, we initially concentrated on lower-level Spanish, for which we have implemented 44 weekly lessons¹⁵⁷.

From the first satellite earth station donated by our alumni, we have expanded to two dish antennas and even have plans for a third one. Our original 6-meter dish permits us to receive regular network television broadcasts from Canada, Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Soviet-bloc countries, as well as certain broadcasts from France and Spain. Since 1989, a new 12-meter dish has improved our reception from the Americas and has also provided access to European satellites as far east as 8º west longitude¹⁵⁸. In the future we intend to dedicate a small dish antenna to receiving SCOLA broadcasts.

Why use video? In most real-life situations, visual information plays a key role in understanding the verbal component of the speaker's message. When students watch video segments, the image contextualizes and reinforces

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the spoken message, making it possible for even novices to comprehend rather difficult texts and giving them a vicarious experience with which to associate new linguistic elements. The visual component not only focuses learners' attention; it also exposes them to aspects of the foreign culture. After viewing an IAV lesson, students frequently ask questions about how people interact with each other and about the material culture of the country being studied. Authentic video captured via satellite dish has proved a powerful tool for discussing and going beyond stereo types about the Hispanic world.

Why use authentic video?¹⁵⁹ Above all, authentic video teaches students real language. They learn to understand material intended to entertain and inform, rather than merely practice with exercises that have been created as an instructional fiction. Well-chosen authentic clips exhibit a linguistic and cultural richness unmatched by video based on scripted didactic texts¹⁶⁰. Furthermore, our students will not only travel and work abroad, but will also have increasing access to foreign video through educational broadcasts, cable and home satellite reception, and rental of foreign films. It is our duty, therefore, to reduce their initial fears of the spoken language. Because authentic video provides an excellent means of training them to understand Spanish at a normal pace with all the complicating factors of spontaneous speech, it both reduces the learners' anxiety and promotes their comprehension.

Why use interactive video? As a special kind of computer-assisted language learning, interactive video permits us to individualize the pacing of the presentation and lets us tailor it to the learners' needs and interests. It provides a personalized yet private learning environment where students need not fear embarrassment. In addition, the computer is a patient tutor: it both demands the learners' involvement in the lesson tasks before it will proceed and persists until they have mastered the essential points. In our approach, IAV motivates listening through an on-going series of tasks accompanied by background information, on-line help, and feedback on student responses, which form a «safety net» of supporting materials to focus, clarify, and confirm. Finally, the interactivity we build into the lessons enhances the learners' retention of the content in them.

In 1985 we began experimenting with ways to integrate IAV into our courses. As our experience with the medium has grown, we have learned to translate sound language pedagogy into effective IAV presentation techniques. Since 1987, our 50-station video lab has had the position occupied by audio labs at most institutions: students come there on their own, once a week, to complete the current IAV assignment. Working at their own pace, they fetish a lesson in about 30 to 45 minutes. In some courses the IAV lessons are done as group activities in class, but in all of them the video clips relate thematically or linguistically to the current textbook assignment¹⁶¹. The clips vary from ten seconds to ten minutes in length and include commercials, songs, interviews, short sketches, portions of dramas or comedies, and the news and weather. Based on television clips written for native viewers, these lessons cannot teach everything students need to know. Because they do relate to the regular curriculum, however, the IAV lessons help students concentrate on specific skills. At the same time, they let learners see how the language actually functions within its cultural context.

In our curriculum, we stress the complementary roles of instructor and IAV To build listening proficiency with authentic materials, we must facilitate and confirm the learners' comprehension of a text, guide their interaction with its linguistic and cultural content in ways which promote retention, and then take advantage of this newly acquired knowledge to develop their productive skills. We capitalize on the special strengths of both man and machine. The computer is an efficient and engaging personal tutor which can pave the way for understanding; nevertheless, in order to proceed from comprehension to utilization, spoken and written interaction with the instructor and with fellow learners remains indispensable.

While all of our exercises clearly correspond to what the students are learning in class, they target the long-term goal of building listening strategies and proficiency, rather than mastery of course content. This focus permits us to introduce native-speed materials far sooner than we had imagined possible. By the end of the first year, our students can easily deal with challenging clips from 3 to 10

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minutes in length. To reach that level, we systematically develop listening skills through IAV lessons written by faculty members who teach the courses in which the video materials are used. From selection of the video clip through writing, evaluation, and revision, teachers may need from 40 to 60 hours to implement a single 35-minute lesson. Consequently, authors are released from some of their teaching duties and also work on the project during the summer.¹⁶²

To exploit authentic video interactively, we rely on several important pedagogical in sights. First, learners do not need to master all the vocabulary, forms and structures in a text in order to understand its message. Second, in dealing with the receptive skills (reading and listening), the most effective strategy is to proceed from the global to the specific, i. e., from the overall idea to the details of content. Third, the traditional concentration on what is new to learners tends to obscure what they already know. (Concern with the words and forms which are the building blocks of the message should come last, not first -if at all.) Finally, implicit or even explicit instruction and practice with strategies for approaching a new text can contribute significantly to proficiency in the receptive skills. Above all, our lessons show students that the level of difficulty lies more in the kinds of tasks we assign (or in their own expectations) rather than in the nature of the text itself.

In our work we have found that each lesson based on authentic video requires its own approach and structure. Although some clips demand much student preparation prior to viewing, others can be understood immediately, and certain exercise types are more appropriate to one text than to another. An unvarying template¹⁶³ for lessons, therefore, is ill-suited to authentic material. We have found that intensive planning sessions involving our entire team are essential both for improving lessons and for developing new ideas and strategies.

In IAV lessons, our general approach is to guide the students from a global understanding of the content-via details which they can handle-to an examination of the grammatical, lexical and phonological building blocks of the message. At the first-year level, we concentrate on identifying simple facts like who, what, when, where. As students progress, we gradually add tasks which require them to understand how and why, to summarize and draw inferences from the message, and to compare and manipulate «blocks» of spoken text. The constant challenge is to give learners tasks appropriate to their level. Often, the same video clip can be exploited in different ways to provide instruction suitable for learners at several proficiency levels.

When starting a lesson, students first receive background information that helps them establish a frame of reference and understand the lesson objectives. At this point an author may also familiarize students with key vocabulary before they watch the video. Next, we provide a heuristic component: a «Socratic dialogue» with the student, i. e., a series of leading questions¹⁶⁴ which helps learners discover the meaning and message in the selection. This discovery phase exposes students to strategies which help improve listening comprehension and which include predicting and verifying content, skimming for general impression, or scanning for specific information. Students learn to take advantage of their knowledge of the real world, as well as their competence as televiewers, in order to exploit visual clues to the intended message and test their conclusions against the linguistic content of the video clip.

Each video listening exercise consists of a series of items which share a common structure. Before students view and hear a passage, they read a message that prepares them for the task they are to perform. Then the passage is played and a question appears on the screen. Before answering, students can replay the passage until they understand it; often additional information on key vocabulary or cultural background is available via a help key. A correct response yields a laudatory message with appropriate feedback (which often includes a transcription of the-relevant words, to develop the students' sense of sound-symbol correspondence), and then the passage is replayed so users can confirm why their response was right. We furnish this feed back to make learners aware of listening strategies and of ways to deduce, infer, organize, and retain information. If the response is incorrect, we give feedback to help learners discover the correct answer on their own. Just

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as native speakers instinctively adjust their speech to the level of foreigners with whom they are talking, on a second try we often play a shorter video segment¹⁶⁵ to isolate essential information. When a student answers incorrectly more than a predetermined number of times, feedback similar to that for a correct response is displayed, and the program proceeds to the next item.

A typical heuristic component consists of several specific steps. At the beginning of it, students see an entire video clip and then are asked questions to determine its genre (commercial, interview, comedy, etc.) and topic. This procedure helps them anticipate both the obvious and implied message. Next, shorter segments are examined, and more specific questions (appropriate to the students' level) are posed about facts in the video material. When the clip's content has been explored in sufficient detail, the video is replayed in its entirety so students can re-integrate the linguistic and visual information into an overall message. After this «guided tour», students may work with a video module which permits them to view the various segments repeatedly and which affords access to transcriptions, translations, and vocabulary lists. To make them aware of how grammatical features function and to help them build vocabulary, we usually provide additional exercises so that students can practice specific listening skills (such as word, phoneme or morpheme recognition in context). The lesson ends with a graded quiz, which reinforces the points taught in the lesson and encourages our students to take the entire lesson seriously.

Although these exercises rely on a variety of question formats, we have found that the most flexible type is multiple-choice. It can be used for dozens of different tasks, ranging from global questions like «which is the best summary?» to inquiries about specific details such as «which word is the speaker saying?». We have developed two special multiple choice formats. In them, two to four segments are shown. In one format, learners determine which of the segments fulfills certain criteria (topic, vocabulary, etc.). In the other, students listen, then answer a multiple-choice question based on what they have heard. A typical task is to identify what topic all the segments have in common. Multiple-choice items guide learners to listen for particular ideas or words and permit precise feedback for the users' responses; consequently, we find this format particularly good for heuristic questions. Multiple-choice questions, more over, demand that authors produce challenging yet fair test items without trivializing the listening task.

In our lessons, other types of questions are also available. Authors can select fill-ins, if a multiple-choice question would give away the answer or if extra practice with spelling or numbers is required. When users enter incorrect responses, the program provides feedback which identifies frequent, predictable errors (use of accents, capitalization, extra or missing letters, etc.), and learners can correct their mistakes without having to retype the entire response. Cloze (i. e., paragraph fill-in) is available in two modes: direct entry or matching (that is, lexically-supported cloze, with specific feedback for wrong choices). In interrupt video, another flexible format valuable for beginners, students are prompted to strike any key at a given cue, such as a specific word or phrase, or a change in topic.

Many proponents of IAV suggest that authors should merely provide learning tools that will enable students to implement their own learning techniques. In sharp contrast, we have found that our most effective lessons are those in which authors actively guide students in developing and exploiting such strategies. In order to accommodate their individual needs, learners want to control the way they move through the IAV lessons. They do, however, prefer guidance to being left on their own. Our students (and presumably their counterparts at other institutions) want to know what is expected of them. For these reasons, we use IAV primarily as a teaching device rather than a learning tool. As students develop their own strategies for learning the language, however, more control over lesson flow is gradually conceded to them.

To determine how effective these video lessons have been in improving listening skills, we are conducting a long-term empirical investigation. The listening proficiency of three «generations» of midshipmen (i. e., three successive sets of students completing the sequence of four courses in fist- and second year Spanish) will be evaluated by comparing the performance of two groups: an experimental

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group (which does a weekly IAV lesson) and a control group (which has comparable exposure to spoken Spanish through audio tapes and linear video)¹⁶⁶. Low attrition at the Naval Academy assures us a stable population in both groups over the four years of the study.

To our knowledge, this is the first large scale study at the post-secondary level to address the most crucial question in IAV-based instruction: Is interactive video worth the commitment of funds and time? We have invested over $300,000 to equip our video lab. In addition, after selecting and committing video clips to disc, we still must spend at least 40 hours to implement each lesson. Experience shows that, in learning with IAV, motivation and attitude continue to improve long after the novelty has faded -but will these affective benefits be matched by enhanced acquisition and retention? We will not know for certain until objective data from our longitudinal study become available in 1991. Nevertheless, we have already accumulated an impressive body of anecdotal evidence supporting our impression of the efficacy of IAV¹⁶⁷.

Despite the extra time required for going to the video lab, most students who use interactive video are positive about their experience. While they acknowledge the continuing need for audio tapes which explicitly reinforce textbook content, they also express appreciation for the cumulative benefit of the IAV lessons. Some themes often recur in the numerous comments made by our students: they value seeing how people five, interact with each other, and speak in various social settings in different Spanish-speaking countries. Above all, students are grateful for the opportunity to observe real-life samples of the language they are studying. Clearly, when the authentic sight and sound of video are used to link classroom study to real-life communication, students are more motivated to learn how to use the language.

While our lessons are conceived as stand alone homework exercises, instructors explicitly integrate and exploit the linguistic and cultural content of the video in their classroom activities. The midshipmen's questions and observations about what they have seen and heard clearly indicate how much they have gleaned from intensive work with authentic video, as well as how a good lesson motivates classroom discussion. Frankly, we have been impressed by the directly observable benefits that well planned authentic IAV can have. In our classes we can feel the inspiration it contributes to the acquisition of language and cultural awareness. From our years of experience with interactive video, we believe that, like all computer-assisted instruction, it can optimize students' learning time. IAV lets them pass over what they already know and concentrate on what they need to learn. We have observed that such individualization leads to more efficient mastery of the material and frees instructors to give personal attention where required. Using interactive video enables us to spend our time building on the students' knowledge instead of making up for deficiencies in it. We also have found that IAV requires learners to remain constantly involved in their instruction. To proceed through a lesson, students must pay full attention to the task at hand. Greater individualization and increased student attention means that half an hour spent with an IAV lesson may contribute as much to a student's learning as hours of traditional work in the classroom or the audio laboratory.

Not only are our students learning from IAV; my fellow instructors and I are also benefiting from our video lessons. Producing any kind of computer-assisted language learning lessons makes one keenly aware of ways to present, coordinate, elicit and test information, and how to provide meaningful assistance and reinforcement to learners whom teachers do not see during the lessons. Heightened awareness of the students' needs can enhance our skills as classroom teachers. By subjecting ourselves to introspection and to critiques by colleagues and students, we find that we are re-evaluating our approach to classroom teaching and that we are becoming more aware of what constitutes appropriate exercises or fair test items.

Since our first efforts in 1984, we have gained many practical insights into the use of authentic IAV. To improve our students' ability to learn Spanish, we have sought to capitalize on their experience as televiewers. Our team has also explored numerous alternative instructional designs to identify the techniques most appropriate for each course level and

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video type. We believe that the thorough longitudinal evaluation will justify the time and resources we have invested in our project.

In real life, communication rarely takes place in a «visual vacuum»: visible surroundings are an integral part of the context of discourse, and clues like gestures and body language play a key role in helping listeners understand what the speaker is saying. Over all, we have found that if students are permitted (and indeed educated) to take advantage of all the possible clues -auditory, visual, and contextual- in authentic video materials, their language learning becomes a very positive, beneficial, and realistic experience.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 73, Number 3, September 1990