Windows Movie Maker in the English as a Foreign Language Class

Abstract

When I was a high school student, my history teacher showed documentaries on the school's film projector. When I participated in a teacher-training program, we learned the importance of the VHS video player as a tool for learning. Now, as an educator, I incorporate multimedia elements, including textbook publishers' DVDs, teacher-created materials, and student films, into every lesson. More recent technological advances have made it possible for teachers to access authentic audiovisual resources directly from the Internet via Web sites such as friction.tv, where users post videos with an eye toward sparking debate; lonelyplanet.tv, where people can post and view videos about travel experiences; or beeline.tv, which allows users to access televised programs from across the world. These resources benefit the modern classroom, but they are often used in ways that leave ultimate control over content with the instructor, thus diminishing student agency in the process of learning. The project described here takes a different approach. In this article, I describe my experiences designing and teaching my Multimedia English course, in which I ask my Japanese university students to use authentic audiovisual resources to become producers of knowledge in the foreign-language classroom. Windows Movie Maker has played a crucial role in the success of this course.