Spanish Video Materials in the Classroom

Abstract

* David H. Darst, Florida State University In July of 1990 Leon County Schools sponsored During the session dedicated to Mexican fulla two-week summer institute at florida Stat length movies (specifically with the musica s University on the use of video mate als in he Pabloy Carolina, Ca e la nube, and Me can classroom. The w lve pan c pants were all lane rogarle) th te chers formula d nu ber of guage teachers certifi d in Spa i h f om the recommendation for pr senting lengthy materi area's middle and high schools. They worked the als to ahigh-school class. All agreed that Spanish first w k with popular Mexican m v es suitabl l nguage fi m do not ecessarily have to be o al ag s suppli d by Gabri l Valdds, direc or so ces of i formation dir ctly related to th of Fo ei n La guag s fo h St te o Flor d an text's daily l on, as ar , for exampl , th lim curator for the State's lending-library of video ited audio-visuals that accompany the popular materials. The teachers spent the second week Spanish for Mastery, nor do films have to serve with the Mexico City morning news, brought in as vocabulary builders. Watching a full-length by the Depanment of Modern Languages' satelmovie in Spanish is in itself a new cultural and lite antenna and seen on single-component video linguistic experience for most high-school stucassette televisions, a hardware system whose dents because very few of them have ever heard classroom applications have been recently deninety minutes of native Spanish. The listening scribed by Altman (Video Connection) and process is a major component of the communiRichardson and Scinicariello. cative spirit that students must acquire, as Un and During each week the teachers worked in Weissenriederhave established in recent studies; groups of four on presentations of the video and it immerses the students within the natural materials, and at the end of each session a sumlinguistic environment of Spanish better than mary of guidelines was established from their materials anificially scripted for the classroom. experiences. The results of their work, as would Furthermore, absorption in a long film allows the be expected, coincide with the PICS students to adapt to the accents, phrases and Videoguidelines compiled by Rick Altman for panicular discourse that are most acceptable to the film Classroom Vignettes. However, the the native speakers for whom the movie was teachers' summaries have the great advantage of originally made (Garcia 3). Optimally, the stuestablishing the process that needs tobe followed dents should seethe movie in its entirety and then when working with video materials. Furtherwork with it in small segments to assure compremore, the actual experience of preparing and hension and to build usage and vocabulary; but presenting the materials among a dozen peers limited time will require most presentations to established a trial and error procedure that rebegin with the segmentary presentations. sulted in reliable guidelines for Spanish video The summer institute panicipants established use in the classroom, four general methodological statements for initiating the presentation of Spanish language films *At.ticles for this section may be sent to Ms. Marilynn to high school students, regardless of grade level.