Is video better suited to one stage of a lesson rather than another? With materials to language , we have an of how materials the question of video's in the lesson.

I will look at this in relation to the stages of a language lesson, presentation, practice, , and to the elicitation stage some teachers introduce before presentation.

(a)Video for elicitation

There are times when you want to encourage talk within the classroom group, with students drawing on their own language to express thoughts they want to . There are also times when you need to find out how much your students know or can do with language. You may have a new group for whom you have to work out a syllabus, or you may want to check to see whether a session is necessary or not. For all of these reasons you may want to hear your students talking with as little prompting as possible from you. Students often find that their ability to produce language which is for a particular situation is less than they had expected. The of getting them to supply the missing dialogue after a silent viewing of a scene provides a good opportunity for you and them to find out what language they have at their command and how flexibly they can use it. When this is your purpose you might use a short for as little as five or ten minutes at the beginning of a lesson.

(b)Video at the presentation stage

In a sense all video material is presenting examples of language. I use the term here in the language teaching sense of the presentation of new language which will be the for the next unit of work. How is video for this stage of a unit? In language teaching we are accustomed t using dialogues which present very examples of language. This is acceptable in the textbook, and can even be made to work on audio, but it is more difficult when we can see real people in a real setting on video. The scene looks awkward and unconvincing if the language is so controlled and repetitive that the becomes quite unnatural. Because of this the language in video materials, even for elementary level, tends to be a little more than it would be in the textbook. Most ELT are intended to what is in the textbook not to replace it and they are intended to be used to consolidate the learning of language that has already been presented in another form.

The Follow Me course is one which does aim to introduce new language through video. This is done within the programme itself by using very examples of language and by recycling these examples through the programme and through the course in a of different short scenes. The fact that Follow Me was for broadcast meant that it had to do its own presentation, as it were, for home viewers. A teacher with a video machine in the classroom has the choice of when to use video material and could for example use a with an setting to a before new language are introduced.

It's very unlikely that video will be your only means of presenting language so you do have a choice. that all the materials you have are equally suitable for your students, the main distinguishing of the video materials is likely to be that they provide the most realistic examples of the language in use. Your choice therefore could be boiled down to whether you want to start with the `real thing' on video, as an example of what the unit is about, or whether you want to keep the most realistic example for later, to what has gone before.

(c) Video used for

This is a good use of video because it capitalises on video's naturalism to present more realistic examples of language, and the support video offers can lighten the additional language load. Video Plan 6 on page 53 is taken from materials intended to be used as language .

In this treatment a variety of is used to elicit the language learners already know before they reach the 'View, Listen and Compare' stage. By then, known have been recycled and and any new ways of asking permission in the can be . A lesson of this kind would be as the stage in a unit of work on ways of asking permission. It could also be a session. What of class time should it take up? We are always interested to know how much classwork any material can . It's a in value for money and we also need to have some idea of how the material will fit into our teaching pattern.

Most of the suggestions made in Teacher's Notes that ELT video materials would lead to a full lesson built round each video unit. The way the video fits into the lesson from one to another. In Video Plan 6 we have an example of very treatment of a very short (26 seconds) where the video is repeatedly returned to as a stimulus to another activity. Its use is woven through the of the lesson. Video Plan 7 a different to a longer (about 15 minutes). Here the viewing of the is used as a springboard for a set of activities which follow it. Most of these refer back to the content of the video but repeat viewing is not suggested.

Lets Watch returns to a viewing of the whole at several points in the suggested of activities. Each unit also includes a second, silent , which provides a basis for of language presented earlier in the unit. Video Plan 8 is taken from the Teacher's Notes and suggests several ways of treating a short silent of about two minutes.