Sysrem, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 1-13, 1992 0346-251X/92 $5.00 + 0.

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Printed in Great Britain 0 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd

VIDEO, FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE

DOCUMENTARY TRADITION

IAN HART

University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This paper examines the relationship between styles of video production and recent
approaches to foreign languages teaching. It is argued that, whereas most
educational television is produced within a “didactic” tradition, following the
principles of instructional design, and presenting scripted native speakers as models,
a “documentary” approach to production, depicting realistic role models and
natural language (including interlanguage) is more appropriate to the goals of
communicative competence as defined in the Australian Language Levels
Guidelines. This paper includes case studies of two recent language video
productions: Chauvigny-2 ou 3 chases que je sais d’elle (for high-school French),
and Ziiu ba! (for upper high school and university Chinese) in which the models
presented are Australian exchange students in France and China.

INTRODUCTION

Modern theories about how foreign languages should be taught in schools stress the
importance of providing input which is “comprehensible, interesting, reIevant, but not
strictly graded” (Littlewood, 1984, p. 60) and equal emphasis is placed on developing an
understanding of the culture of the target language community. These concerns are
accompanied by an interest in the use of “authentic” texts, including television programs.
Such video documents are often difficult to use in class-the language is colloquial, dense
and rapidly paced, the programs are of unsuitable length for class study, and the subject
matter does not always sustain the interest of teenage language learners.

A large number of articles have appeared in language teaching journals over the past decade
describing strategies and pitfalls in using video in the language classroom (Gillespie, 1985;
Morrison, 1987). Lonergan’s Video in Language Teaching (1984) has been an influential
text for some time, updated more recently by Altman’s The Video Connection (1989) and
Stempleski and Tomalin’s Video in Action (1990).

These publications are principally concerned with the practical issues of choosing and using
both authentic television programs and televised language courses in the classroom. Less
has been written on the issues involved in producing video materials for language teaching.
One of the reasons for this neglect, I suspect, stems from a feeling of mutual discomfort
(even mistrust) between video producers (who emphasise the importance of technique) and
linguists (concerned not to be seen to be producing an entertainment program)-a

1
2 IAN HART

phenomenon I discussed at some length in Video in Higher Education (1984). This feeling
is clearly reflected in Jensen’s (1988) paper in System describing the production of language
video material (her emphasis) free of “cutting, panning, zooming and so on, which are
(the director’s) normal means of commenting on the plot and manipulating the spectator’s
experience to feel part of the plot” (p. 323). Her proposition that one can, and should,
separate the language content of the video communication from its other elements is, as
she admits, something not everyone would agree with.

The subject of the interrelationship between the video medium and what it seeks to teach
is of some concern for those of us involved in video pedagogy for, as Salomon (1979, p. x)
points out, “. . . the characteristics of media symbol systems can shape not only knowledge
acquisition and organization through a particular medium but also the differential
development of cognitive skills . . .” To examine this proposition adequately one needs
to bring together the, until recently, unrelated disciplines of media analysis and language
acquisition theory.

A number of authors have been setting the groundwork. Clarke (1989), in a special feature
for Language Teaching Abstracts, examines the influence of communications theory on
the production of materials for language teaching, including video. Altman (1990) attempts
to reconcile schema theory and discourse analysis in language video material.

In this necessarily rather anecdotal paper I examine some of the stylistic, technical and
linguistic issues which arose in the production of recent video programs for French and
Chinese teaching. In a follow-up paper I propose to report on the results of classroom
evaluations of these programs (currently in progress) and to advance some propositions
about the ways in which video can be produced to assist and enhance the teaching and
learning of foreign languages.

CHAUVIGNY-2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE

In July 1987 I was awarded a bow-se by the French Government to spend a 6-month
attachment at the University of Poitiers Audiovisual Centre. It was suggested that, while
there, I might like to produce some video material for French language teaching in Australia.
(The assumption made by many people that one can “knock together” a video program,
like taking a few photographs or collecting postcards, is something I will discuss in more
detail below.) The University of Poitiers had video facilities and production staff so, it
still being the summer vacation, we set about looking for subjects: Chateaux of the Loire
was obvious because of proximity, as was Winemaking in Bordeaux, Porcelaine of Limoges,
Fruits de Mer, Gastronomy of Poitou . . . “Adult subjects”, our children pointed out,
“Boring.” They were more interested in cooling off in French swimming pools, annoying
hedgehogs in the forest and eating pommes frites.

Then came September and la Rent&e and our three children were enroled in local schools.
The lo-year-old twins (who spoke no French) went to a two-teacher village school; our
15year-old daughter (with three years of school French) was enrolled in 3eme in nearby
Chauvigny. Their experiences of the school system, making friends, coping with homework
 VIDEO, FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 3

in a foreign language consumed our lives in those first weeks and it very quickly became
obvious that this was the only subject worth filming.

The University of Poitiers provided a video crew and U-matic equipment. We produced
two programs: a 25min documentary on a rural village school, structured around the twins’
progress in French over 5 months; and a 35min collection of self-contained “vignettes”
of life in Chauvigny through the eyes of our 15year-old daughter. The programs were
pre-edited in France then brought home for completion in Australia.

It was at the stage of showing the partly completed material to teachers and language advisers
that I became aware that we had produced something unusual. The level of enthusiasm
over what I had thought of as no more than reasonably professional home movies came
as a pleasant surprise. We produced a small booklet to accompany the programs which
contained a transcript, information on the region, the school system, and so forth; we
showed the programs at French in-service days and State language consultants included
a brochure in mail-outs to teachers; and by the end of the year over 200 copies of the
programs had been sold. This represents a large proportion of Australian high schools
teaching French.

I began some informal research, trying to establish what teachers and students found
attractive about these programs and how they compared with other video materials they
were using. I had been concerned that the spoken French was often colloquial and difficult;
there were grammatical errors and even occasional communication breakdowns. The actors
were not slick and sophisticated French speakers but very ordinary French and Australian
children who were just trying to communicate. The answer came back very strongly: these
were precisely the programs’ strengths. Australian children could identify with Tanya, Nick
and Michael. They could look at what was happening and say to themselves: “I could
do that, too!” It was an empowering experience for the student viewer.

A colleague in the Chinese department of our University suggested that it would be

interesting to develop similar programs for Asian languages. We have now done so and
later in this paper I describe how we went about it. Firstly, however, I propose to look
briefly at some of the theoretical issues which emerged as we were developing these
programs.

APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING

When I was a reluctant student of French at school, the Behaviourist, or “habit formation”,
view of language acquisition was the dominant methodology of language teaching. In simple
terms, this view states that “The acquisition of skill (in a language) consists essentially
of the automation of low-level plans or units of activity . . . The result of automation is
that less and less effort is to be spent on lower level patterns and more and more capacity
is available for higher level decision . . .” (Levelt, 1978, pp. 57-58) This view resulted in
teaching methodologies which placed a great deal of emphasis on repetition or drills in
order to overcome the interference from the first language and establish new habits. It
was an approach which placed the primary responsibility for language acquisition on the
skill and organisation of the teacher.
4 IAN HART

In recent times, in Australia at least, there has been a rethinking of many of the assumptions
underlying why and how we should approach the teaching of languages in schools. [For
a detailed description of the position, see Australian Language Levels Guidelines (A.L.L.
Guidelines).] These assumptions owe much to the Cognitive view of learning and the work
of applied linguists such as Halliday, Corder, Kraschen and Terrell. They give students
credit for the development of an interlanguage and recognise that second-language learners
(certainly those in a foreign country) are always going to be somewhere on a continuum
of transitional competence and are unlikely to achieve native speaker fluency-a state which
most textbooks and language video programs present as the ideal to be emulated. This
“communicative competence” approach emphasises the learning of a variety of strategies
for communication-skills in establishing and maintaining relationships, obtaining
information, negotiating and transacting and so forth, as well as developing learning-how-
to-learn skills. It is very much a learner-centred approach, placing much greater
responsibility for language acquisition on the student.

Using native speakers as the principal models in language video programs is consistent
with “habit-information” approaches to language learning such as the Audio-Lingual
Method. My informal research with the French programs seemed to indicate that the use
of native speaker models also creates a barrier between the program and the viewer: a model
of perfection which the learner will never succeed in emulating perfectly; an expectation
of inadequate performance. By contrast, what our French “home movies” had achieved,
by using language learners as the principle models, was to empower the viewer. Students
could see that, even with an imperfect knowledge of the language, it was possible to
communicate successfully, to enjoy the experience and to improve, a proposition entirely
consistent with the A.L.L. Guidelines’ emphasis on communicating in the language rather
than learning to manipulate its structure.

If this student-centred style of production is a successful and valid approach to designing

video programs for language learning, why do we not see more of it? On the language
teaching side, the answer is probably bound up in the debate concerning interlanguage
and language fossilisation-is it valid to present as models students speaking an
interlanguage? (This will be the subject of further research-see below.) On the production
side, I believe we must examine the traditions in which video pedagogy exists.

“DIDACTIC” VS “DOCUMENTARY” TRADITIONS

Most educational video is produced within what one might call “the didactic tradition”-a
set of practices which have grown up around the discipline of instructional design. This
is essentially a Systems approach to the creation of audiovisual materials and places great
emphasis on the achievement of testable goals. Most broadcast educational television is
in this tradition, with the additional overlay of the TV industry’s fvrmats, production
methods and time restrictions-which means that most programs are 30 min long, are very
carefully scripted, employ professional actors and place great store on high production
values (particularly if they bear the logo of the BBC or ABC).

The usual format employed in the didactic tradition is structured on the “ideal” classroom
 VIDEO, FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 5

lesson. One can discern in the scripts the first six of Gag&s “Nine Events of Learning”:
Gain Attention, Inform the Learner of the Objectives, Stimulate Recall of Prior Knowledge,
Present the Stimulus Material, Provide Learner Guidance and Elicit Performance. (In recent
times interactive technology has made it possible for the program to carry out even the
last three steps: Provide Feedback, Assess Performance and Enhance Retention and
Transfer.)

This is an entirely appropriate way for educational video programs to be structured,

providing their purpose is to replace the classroom teacher. However, in First World
countries, where teachers are plentiful and well trained, this is no longer a systemic necessity.
And since VCRs have become so cheap and available, allowing teachers to time-shift
television programs at their convenience and to use only the sections which fit in with their
lesson plans, the “didactic” 30-min ETV program is becoming less relevant. Teachers are
looking more widely for material and are making more use of other formats, such as
documentary.

The documentary pre-dates television by at least 30 years. The term usually refers to that
tradition begun by pioneers such as Flaherty, Ivens, Cavalcanti and Grierson, and amplified
by tine’ veritP and ethnographic film makers of the 1950s and 1960s. The concern of the
documentarist has always been to examine the interrelationship between people and their
environments-a search for cinematic “truth”. Documentary film makers structure their
material around the ways in which people are affected by the systems, processes, political
events, hardships, jobs, and environments in which they find themselves.

By background and by inclination I am a documentary film maker, not a TV producer.

My training in film production in London in the 1960s and at Film Australia in the 1970s
under Stanley Hawes (one of John Grierson’s lieutenants) puts me squarely in the classical
documentary tradition. The French programs are very much documentaries, not didactic
programs. The dominant theme is the relationship between the three Australian students
and their schools, their friends and the environment of a French country town. The language
they speak is a natural product of the need for communication.

We can distinguish, then, between two contrasting approaches to the production of video
material for language teaching, the didactic style, which, for the purposes of this paper,
we might see as ‘language-centred”, and the more “student-centred” documentary style:

l In the didactic approach, the target language is the primary concern. Everything else-
plot, characters, setting, structure, music, etc.-are scripted around the teaching of
particular vocabulary and language structures.

l The primary concerns of the documentary approach are the relationships between the
learner and the socio-cultural environment. The words and structures used in
communication emerge naturally from the situations portrayed.

It is my proposition that the documentary, “student-centred” approach is a more

appropriate use of the video medium given the contemporary emphasis on communicative
competence, and can also have positive, testable outcomes in the language learning process.
6 IAN HART

DOCUMENTARY TECHNIQUE

The real strength of the video medium is its ability to tell a story. Like music, it is a “linear”
medium, existing primarily in time-as distinct from, say, textbooks, which exist primarly
in space, independent of time. It is a multi-medium, exploiting a wide range of human
responses-not just sound and vision, but memory, emotion, identification, humour,
curiosity, melody, rhythm, pace . . . The experience of making meaning from a video
communication is very complex and has never adequately been defined in spite of the best
efforts of semiologists and deconstructionists.

The documentary director (unlike the director of drama or didactic material) approaches
his subject matter with the most rudimentary of scripts-often little more than a list of
locations, people and events. He very likely has some themes in mind and, like everyone
else, carries an assortment of personal ideologies and biases, but to be effective he must
strive to be receptive to possibility and open to surprise. A director who is bound by
preconceptions or a watertight script is likely to miss out on opportunities which could
galvanise the finished production.

A simple, but telling example, occurred in the Chauvigny program during the last set-up
for the day when Tanya was being interviewed by my colleague Francois Marchessou. They
began in French, then Francois repeated the questions in English. While the crew was
packing up, Tanya explained that she was very unhappy with the English answers: in French
she had been confident and outgoing, but in her native language she had felt awkward
and shy. “When you speak a foreign language,” she said, “it’s really like you can escape
and pretend to be someone else . . . you can do all kinds of other strange things too.”
We unpacked all the equipment and set up the lights again-this insight into the role of
imagination in learning a foreign language became a central theme of the program.

Watching a documentary program being made is a mystifying experience for most people.
The process seems have neither direction nor unity. One sees tightly planned and scripted
interviews and action sequences, followed by elaborate set-ups which take an inordinate
amount of effort for a few seconds of tape, and there are significant events at which it
seems the camera was only present by accident! At times ones feels that the director and
crew are making it up as they go along.

They are. The point at which the program comes together is in the editing room when
the director and editor (often one and the same) restructure the location material to forge
a new reality, to make sense of what happened in the field.

There is, of course, no universal method of working. Documentary directors are all
individualists. Some write detailed scripts through many drafts; some plan sequences
elaborately on location and hardly change a thing in editing. I usually write scripts, but
they are no more than statements of intent designed to obtain support or funding. The
final product is invariably greatly affected by what happened on location.

Z&J BA! (LET’S GO!)

The China Project began with the proposition that if student-centred, documentary
 VIDEO, FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 7

programs were empowering for learners of French, how much more so they could be for
learners of Chinese, where both language and cultural gaps were so much greater. In
addition, the learning of Asian languages is considered to be politically important in
Australia and there are funds available for the production of teaching material. As to actors,
the Australia-China Council sponsors six 18-year-old students each year to take 12 months
off between school and university to study in China. They are invariably outgoing and
intelligent young people as well as good language students-ideal subjects for a
documentary. We proposed a program which involved our meeting them in Australia, prior
to departure, then visiting them in China a few months later to record their progress.

Obtaining the funding involved a balancing act. We persuaded WIN Television, a local
commercial station, that the story of six 18-year-olds in China would make a program that
might interest the networks. If they could supply a video crew and equipment, we could
organise the cost of fares and accommodation as well as interpreters and permission to
film. We then approached the Australia-China Council with the proposition that if they
would provide funds for travel and accommodation we could produce professional quality
video material to publicise the “Young Australian Scholars in China” program and assist
the promotion of Asian languages in schools. In China the students would be studying
at Erwai, the Beijing Second Foreign Languages Institute, which has had a lo-year exchange
relationship with the University of Canberra. Erwai agreed to organise the necessary
permission to film and to provide logistic support in China.

We had one false start. In January 1989 we interviewed the six Young Scholars before
they departed then booked our tickets to Beijing for 20 June. Tiananmen Square erupted
on 4 June and the students were sent home. The project was abandoned and the money
was returned. It was an emotional time. The students returned to China in September,
not to Beijing but to the East China Normal University in Shanghai.

We set the project up again, and the following January had the benefit of being able to
film students from the 1989 group briefing the 1990 Young Scholars before departure.
Additionally, two of the 1989 students were still in Shanghai and would be able to provide
us with a more experienced perspective on life in China.

We discussed the project with the six students and asked them to look out for interesting
stories to record. One student, a musician, had hopes of joining a Chinese rock band,
another wanted to play in a Chinese football team, others were interested in martial arts,
traditional painting, medicine . . . My main concern was that the students themselves should
find stories which they (and, by extension, Australian students the same age) would find
interesting, rather than imposing “adult subjects” on them.

In May I had the chance to visit China as part of a University delegation. I used it as a
research trip, to look at locations and to meet the students. Settling into life on a Chinese
university campus had been so difficult that they had not given the filming much thought.
Our musician had managed to meet a rock group, but since Tiananmen this type of music
was definitely out of favour. Foreign students were not really welcome in organised team
sports, so the football story looked doubtful. It was rumoured that there was a martial
arts teacher somewhere on campus . . . Another problem was that the authorities were
8 IAN HART

not anxious to encourage contacts between Chinese and overseas students and, although
nothing was directly forbidden, our Young Scholars were finding it difficult to make the
kinds of contacts we had hoped for.

The situation in Shanghai was, thankfully, very different. The two young women who had
remained from the 1989 group were, by now, very accomplished speakers of Chinese and
were attending regular university lectures. They had a great number of friends who were
actors, artists and writers, and had developed considerable insights into Chinese life. They
pointed out that at the end of the first semester the Beijing students would be so exhausted
and feeling so negative about China that we might not get the opinions and stories we
hoped for. We decided it would be worth spending at least half our production time in
Shanghai.

A crew of five departed from Sydney for Shanghai on Saturday 16 June: the associate
producer (a Chinese expert), a production manager (who also speaks Chinese), cameraman
and sound recordist (from WIN Television) and director. We brought Betacam equipment
(a Bosch 3CCD camera and Ampex recorder), tripods, mics, a mixer, a portable lighting
kit . . . 85 kg spread over six boxes. A journalist from Xi’an television, who had applied
to come to Australia on exchange, agreed to meet us in Shanghai and work as our local
expert.

At Shanghai Airport the customs officials confiscated the camera. The official reason was
that our paperwork was not complete, but I believe there was also a residual memory from
Tiananmen Square 12 months earlier when the ubiquitous Betacams of the World News
had been a provocative influence on the demonstrations. Luckily our friends at Erwai in
Beijing were able to fax copies of letters bearing adequate numbers and sizes of official
stamps and we recovered the camera after 2 days.

In looking back over my location notes I find that the greatest number of entries refer
to the weather and to the frustrations of dealing with petty officials and drivers. June and
July are not the best time to try to get anything done in China-the temperature is in the
40s and Shanghai is very humid. People follow the tropical rhythm of life: getting up early,
having a midday siesta and working late. This is not the ideal timetable for video production
but, as we were dependent on the goodwill of the university, we needed to adhere to it
even though it meant that off-campus filming was restricted to a couple of hours in the
morning and afternoon.

The Shanghai students had done their job and we had plenty of subjects: interviews with
fellow students, artists and actors; a sequence in the College of Traditional Medicine; visits
to silk shops, markets, a tailor and the home of a teacher.

The silk sequence is an example of how serendipidous events can change the course of
production. We had a script for this sequence: Francesca, our student, was to go to a silk
shop in Nanjing Road, the busy main street of Shanghai, and buy a length of cloth: she
would go to a tailor and have it made up into a blouse for her mother; she would mail
it home. Our driver, fearing that he might miss his lunch if we had to drive all the way
into Nanjing Road, suggested that we shoot it nearby at the Shanghai No. 1 Silk Dying
 VIDEO, FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 9

Works where he had some guanxi (a friend worked there). Drivers are influential people
in China and we agreed to his proposal, thinking we could record our sequence in the factory
shop then take some shots of Nanjing Road later and edit them together.

On arriving at the factory showroom we were told we only had 20 min to shoot the sequence
because the fashion parade was about to start and our driver (by now a co-producer!) had
arranged that we would film it. The prospect of a Chinese fashion show in 40°C heat in
a malodorous dye factory was not something calculated to fill us with joy, but dutifully
we hurried through the silk-buying sequence and trooped up to the top floor . . . It was
like entering a different world! The show was as sophisticated and haut couture as anything
one would see on the catwalks of Paris-in fact this troupe of models had recently returned
from a tour of Europe where they had been the sensation of the fashion world. The parade
became the focus of the brightest and most exciting sequence that we brought back from
Shanghai.

Another sequence where luck played a part involved meeting Andrew, an Australian
exchange student and enthusiastic amateur video producer. He took us to Lu Xun Park
at dawn where the old people of Shanghai come to do their morning exercises, air their
song birds, play mah jong, practice musical instruments, join rock ‘n’ roll dance groups
led by female sergeant-majors with whistles, or just sit in the sun and talk. Our story revolves
around Andrew being interviewed by a Chinese journalist about the film he is making on
China.

We spent 10 days in Shanghai, shooting eight stories with the two 1989 exchange students
and their friends, then flew to Beijing to join the six new Young Scholars. Their first semester
had indeed been exhausting and they had any number of bitter tales to tell, but they were
in good spirits and full of ideas for sequences to film. The rock band, unfortunately, had
not materialised-police were attending rock concerts and breaking them up. As to sport,
the best they could offer us was a pick-up volleyball game between Chinese and foreign
students. They had, however, found a martial arts expert and a woman who carved
traditional Chinese chops (personal seals) in stone. Their language teachers were happy
to appear on screen, they had some ideas about travelling outside Beijing and they had
lots of friends. One of the girls was planning an end of term party for her friends where
she would introduce them to the gastronomic delights of pizza and Vegemite sandwiches.
This became our first sequence.

Simone--Han Simeng-had been attending calligraphy classes, learning to write her rather
complicated name in large characters. We filmed the lesson, then had her use the poster-
sized characters to explain the meaning of her name in English. We then arranged for her
“chop” to be designed and carved, illustrating another form in which names appear. The
shooting of this story provides an example of how we went about setting up sequences
to produce coherent and useful dialogue for Chinese studies.

The director was responsible for choosing locations and camera angles and so forth, but
the key to successful and realistic language content was the student’s ability to keep the
unscripted conversation flowing. Simone became quite an expert. As the calligraphy teacher
was painstakingly painting her name over five or six “takes” she continued to question
10 IAN HART

him about how Chinese names are chosen and how one tells the different between male
and female names. From the resulting half-hour of discussion we were able to edit 2 min
of succinct answers in beautiful Chinese. However, when we came to film the “explanation”
of her name Simone, like Tanya in France, found it very difficult to switch to English
as it involved switching character as well. We needed nine takes to get that sequence to work.

The teacher who was to carve Simone’s seal misunderstood the purpose of the program
we were making. She kept trying to give a commentary on what she was doing in English,
but Simone persevered with Chinese. The result was one of those multi-language
conversations one often has in foreign countries, complete with mispronunciations and
misunderstandings, but which is educationally very instructive.

“This,” says the teacher, holding up an exquisitely carved seal depicting a running
horse, “is ‘house’. ”
“Ah, zhP shi m5,” replies Simone. IThis is m5 = horse] “You were born in the year
of the horse.”
ZhP shi jti I&g, ” says the teacher, holding up another seal
“Jti l&g? I don’t understand.” [jti is a rarely used word, meaning ‘huge’, ‘immense’;
long = dragon]
‘Jiii . . . means ‘big’ ”
“Ah, d2 I&g-big dragon!” ]Simone substitutes the more common word]
“DC?ldng . . .” agrees the teacher.

One advantage of using a foreign student as one of the parties in a conversation is that
the native speaker will talk a little more slowly and clearly and will continually check up
on whether he/she is being understood, usually by repeating the same information in a
different way. In the party sequence we had 14 people sitting around a table, talking and
laughing at the tops of their voices. We suggested that pairs of students improvise short
conversations and asked the other 12 to stop talking while we filmed. The party had been
going for some time before we began and everyone was in a “hyped-up” mood, so the
conversations were not hesitant nor shy and ranged across subjects from food preferences
to holiday plans to life back home.

We returned to Australia with nearly 20 hr of material. The first program to be edited

was a 15min information program on the Young Scholars project for the Australia-China
Council. The program is in English and Chinese (though the meaning of most of the Chinese
can be guessed from context). It begins in Australia, with the pre-departure interviews then
picks the students up 5 months later in China. It makes use of popular music and montage,
interspersed with short action sequences and interviews to give the impression that, in spite
of some hardship, the experience has been fun and rewarding. Originally designed as public
relations for the exchange program, this program also serves as the introduction to the
language study package. Students are introduced to the “Young Scholars” not as brilliant
linguists communicating effortlessly in Chinese, but as a group of very ordinary Australian
18-year-olds who are surviving, enjoying themselves and rapidly improving their language
skills.
 VIDEO, FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 11

The major part of the package is a set of 10 “language study” sequences, each 7-8 min
long, edited from the 16 stories we filmed in China. Each story depicts one or more
Australian students interacting with Chinese native speakers-establishing relationships,
negotiating, obtaining and using information, transacting. Some are straightforward
interviews, others contain comparatively little dialogue, relying on pictures and sounds to
carry the story, some are quite complex mini-stories. No attempt has been made to structure
the language or grade the sequences for difficulty.

As well as providing examples of natural everyday language, these sequences contain strong
messages about the relationship between language and culture. All the communication takes
place within an identifiably Chinese environment-at times this may come as a surprise,
as with the fashion parade-and the meaning of the communication must be interpreted
through the context.

Another message carried by the language study package is about the students’ abilities and
strategies as language learners. “Good language learners” according to Rubin (1975, p. 43)
are “willing to appear foolish, to take risks, to make mistakes”, compared with students
“who need to be confident that grammar is correct before attempting a sentence in the
target language.”

The third component of the package is to be a collection of accompanying printed

material-transcripts, additional information and suggestions for use. This is to be compiled
by a consultancy group of Chinese teachers.

EVALUATION

Obtaining an objective evaluation of this material is not as simple as merely giving a test,
as the primary purpose of the package is not didactic. It does not set out to replace the
classroom teacher, but to provide effective support for the type of language syllabus
described in the A.L.L. Guidelines.

The package has a number of clearly defined goals:

l to promote identification, enthusiasm and engagement;

0 to provide acceptable models of spoken Chinese (including mterlanguage) for students
to emulate;
l to illustrate the type of communication strategies set out in the A.L.L. Guidelines in
action;
l to show how learning-how-to-learn skills are developed and practised; and
l to demonstrate the interrelatedness of Chinese language and culture.

These are, on the whole, Affective rather than Cognitive goals, and it is appropriate that
a language syllabus for the 1990s should pay attention to both. They are, as Bloom (1964)
points out in Book 2 of the Taxonomy, inextricably related. Affective goals support the
achievement of language learning by encouraging the student to “engage” with the task,
12 IAN HART

empowering the student and developing his/her self-image as a potentially successful

communicator in the target language.

In order to evaluate the degree to which we have succeeded in achieving these goals I propose
to carry out a variety of qualitative procedures over the next 10 months. These will include
surveys, classroom observations, interviews and phenomenographic studies on my target
audience: students of Chinese in the last years of high school and the early years of university
study. Working closely with several teachers who have agreed to trial the programs, I will
observe and videotape the lessons and conduct regular interviews with students. My aim
will be to establish the ways in which viewers perceive the material and what they learn
from it.

From the point of view of language video pedagogy, the two most important issues would
seem to be:

l What is the effect of using, as models, students who are speaking an interlanguage?
l Are the production techniques used (the documentary style) effective in promoting
identification, motivation and engagement in the audience?

However, I am aware that qualitative evaluation methods, and particularly phenomeno-

graphic techniques, have the characteristic of raising quite different and unexpected
questions as the research proceeds.

I hope to be able to report on the evaluative study in a later edition of this journal. I would
be pleased to receive correspondence from readers who have attempted similar studies or
who would like more details of this project.

VIDEO PROGRAMS

Chauvigny-2 ou 3 chases que je sais d’elie (1988) Canberra College of Advanced Education and University
of Poitiers, 35 min, VHS colour, with accompanying notes.
Villeneuve-me petite t’cole ri /a carnpagne (1988) Canberra College of Advanced Education and University of
Poitiers, 27 min, VHS colour.
Zbu ba! (1991) University of Canberra and WIN Television, 90 min. VHS colour, accompanying notes, currently
in production.

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 VIDEO. FOREIGN LANGUAGES TEACHING AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 13

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