Using Multimedia in the Foreign Language Classroom | Page 46

version of the story to the original one. Reconstruction can be either oral or written.
This technique can also be used in order to help students formulate real questions.
These are questions whose answer is not known in advance. The teacher plays the
introduction of a documentary and asks from students to write down what they would
like to find out from the rest of the video. Students can work in pairs or groups in
order to formulate their questions. After that, the video is played back and students
find out whether their questions have been answered. In case some questions remain
unanswered, the teacher can assign this as a follow up activity for homework. Task
dependency principle. In this reason, the whole lesson creates the conditions for an
information gap
3.10 Culture comparison
According to Tomalin (1990: 28), this activity requires from students to focus
on differences and similarities between the mother-tongue culture and the culture of
an English speaking country. It has been pointed out above that there not a single
culture which applies to all English speaking countries. However, As British and
American cultures are predominant, and the English taught in schools most of the
times originates from either of these two cultures, a video extract is a good way of
comparing the students’ culture to that reflected in the video. The comparison can
elicit a lot of discussion concerning the similarities and differences of the two
cultures. Apart from the obvious linguistic gains, the students exposure to another
culture helps them become more tolerant against other cultures, something which
considered a necessary first step for the fight of racism.
The teacher can ask students to identify similarities and differences in the way
people are dressed, the gestures they make, the way they greet each other etc. This
activity is very suitable for building vocabulary. Students can work cooperatively
after having watched the video in order to find other cultures with similar habits and
this can take the form of a project where different subjects such as geography and
religion are involved.

4. A model lesson

This section presents a model lesson which aims at enhancing the contribution

of the video in the teaching process. The lesson follows a three-stage framework (see
lesson plan in appendix III) and is accompanied by paper-based materials which help

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