from VCCA Journal, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring/Summer 1988, 40-42
© Copyright 1988 VCCA Journal
"I put the spoon to the right, next to the knife. The fork is to the left." Fourteen-year-old Mimi was already visualizing the long road that led from Quebec to Hollywood. And from behind a tripod in a tangle of extension cords, I was reflecting upon the wonderful advantages of a new medium for teaching French. Little did it matter to me in 1972 that a clumsy reel-to-reel recorder took time and energy to tell its story in black and white. Whether one used a camera to synchronize easy vocabulary with show-and-tell shots or recorded movies, documentaries, and plays directly from television, it seemed that video offered a wonderful opportunity to make language and culture come alive.
After my eight week stay in Quebec, I returned to the college classroom with my treasure of tapes. I soon learned that my students had more than a little difficulty following the sound track. It only seemed to confirm their suspicions that normal students would never comprehend more than the artificial exercises of a patient teacher.
In desperation, I tested my ability to take dictation in a foreign language. Play, stop, rewind, play, stop.... My tape recorder took a beating before texts were transferred en toto (well almost) to purple duplicator sheets. It was a vast improvement if not the panacea that I had hoped for.
A glimpse of the real solution came two years later in Sweden while I was visiting friends. For the first time, I watched a television program with captions for the deaf in a foreign language. How easy it seemed to link the written and spoken language although I knew no Swedish. Oh, to have subtitles...mere electronic dreams beyond the reach of college professors.
Fortunately, appropriate technology in the form of the overhead project came to my rescue. As usual, the process took plenty of time and patience. First, I manufactured a cover (raised slightly above the screen to prevent overheating) with a four-inch by one-inch opening, sufficient to show three lines of text. Then I placed a white cardboard beneath the television screen. The text itself was divided into three columns on a sheet of paper before being photocopied onto an overhead transparency. After cutting apart the columns and scotch taping them end to end, I was ready to proceed. My invention worked equally with a television program or film. While the titles were clear and easy to read, it was not difficulty to identify the disadvantages. Setting up the VCR and positioning the overhead projector somewhere in the middle of the classroom wasted valuable time. Nor could one assign the students to watch the programs outside of the class. Nevertheless, I did use my system rather extensively subtitling anything from FACSEA films to Sesame Street TV programs.
Returning from a two year teaching assignment overseas in 1984, I found that the audiovisual scene had changed dramatically in the United States. Suddenly, there were satellite dishes, camcorders, and foreign movies for sale or rent. Recent feature length films in color with English subtitles offered high entertainment value. The pedagogical advantages were a bit more problematic. Students read the titles, but found it hard to juggle two languages simultaneously. And there was no reward for listening carefully. To my chagrin I witnessed one student during an out-of-class assignment blithely turning the sound off to enjoy his movie without the distractions of a foreign language!
For my next experiment, I turned to the closed caption decoder sold my Sears for the hearing impaired. The Radio Canada television network includes subtitles in French on a number of its programs such as the nightly news, a weekly movie, and several sitcoms. The two hundred dollar decoder intercepts the signal before it fed through the VCR or television set. Once the program has been recorded, one does not need the decoder for playback.
The results were somewhat disappointing. Because the closed captions are designed for the hearing impaired, they are not word for word transcriptions nor are they synchronized exactly with the soundtrack. The titles themselves are in capital letters without French accents. The decoder interferes somewhat with the signal which is not a problem with cable reception. However, because of the weaker signal from the satellite, annoying horizontal lines degrade the quality of the picture; the instability of the titles make them difficult to read at times.
But in 1987 the Amiga computer finally brought out its long promised Genlock attachment. This three hundred dollar device plugs into the back of the computer allowing one to merge computer-generated texts or graphics with pre-recorded videos. The process is relatively simple.
A helpful colleague designed a simple program for my subtitles which allowed for one, two, or three centered lines with a black background. After typing out the text and saving it on a disc, two video recorders are connected to the Genlock attachment. The video signal goes from one recorder through the Genlock where it is combined with the pre-established text to be recorded by the second VCR.
One must listen carefully to the soundtrack; pressing the mouse button twice brings up a set of titles (one to three lines). If a period of silence follows, one presses the mouse once to clear the screen and then again for the next titles. It is relatively easy to synchronize the text closely with the dialogue, and if there is a pause in the narration or the conversation one can keep the titles on the screen to allow students more time to read them.
A variety of approaches can be used with the same material. For example, students might view a program with English titles, then with French titles, and finally without any at all. One can insert questions or comments either during the program or at the end. None of this requires the presence of the instructor once the recording has been done. The initial establishment of the text can, of course, be quite time-consuming, especially if one does not have a written text. The L'Avant-Scene Cinema publishes the complete scenarios of well-known French films on a regular basis.
A quick perusal of any weekly guide for satellite TV viewers will show how rapidly international programing has been expanding. Bravo (F4-02) has one to two films a night, either subtitled or dubbed and without commercials. The mostly European television shows in a variety of languages on the International Television Network (W4-19) are easy to follow in their large legible subtitles. Radio Canada (AD-15), Univision (G1-06) provide a good variety of French and Spanish programing from morning until night. Galavision (G1-20) confines itself to nightly Spanish films. SCOLA from Creigton University (T2-24) makes available recorded newscasts (one week late) from Europe, Latin America and the Middle East from 9 until 5 Monday through Friday. To take full advantage of these services, one should have a VCR in order to do time shifting since some of the programs appear in the middle of the night.
Videos, whether titled in English or the target language, will not by themselves loosen the tongue and open the ears of our students. Used creatively to supplement classroom instruction they can, however, put the much maligned "wasteland" to good use.
Carroll Yoder has a PhD in French literature from the University of Iowa. He teaches French and English at Eastern Mennonite College. His overseas experience includes a Fulbright lectureship at Marien Ngouabi University, Brazzaville, Congo.