1The early history of English for specific purposes (ESP) was full of program descriptions and accounts of syllabus and course design, often accompanied by examples of teaching materials. Since the introduction of the English for Specific Purposes Journal (ESPJ) in 1980 and of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) a couple of decades later, the articles appearing therein have had a decidedly textual bent with regrettably few instances of ethnographic inquiry into ESP situations, or of methodological or taskological innovation. This drift has often been to the chagrin of the editors, while regular reviewers, such as myself, frequently complain that these predominating discourse analyses (of various types and scopes) typically fail to offer toward any concrete accounting of the pedagogical implications and outcomes of their well-crafted analyses. It appears that the more practitioner-oriented submissions usually fail to survive the rigorous editorial process because they are unable to make sufficient points of general ESP interest amid their detailed accounts of their situated departmental or classroom activities. Indeed, today the chance of experienced practitioners with years of successful pedagogical innovations getting articles published in these journals is less than those finishing a doctoral thesis based on a corpus and offering some kind of genre-analysis.
2My own limited efforts to try and rebalance this situation have not been marked by success. In 2015, I published an article on writing about pictures in ESPJ, based on a doctoral seminar I audited on “the history of art history”. Toward the end, I closed with a fully-articulated set of activities based on a small oil-painting that I happened to possess, closing with an eight-sentence reordering exercise. I even added this parenthesis: “(Readers might like to try this for themselves)”. Well, none of these possible readers in the ensuing seven years have ever contacted me with something like “Here is my answer; is it correct?” Three years later, Justine Post, an ex-doctoral student of mine, and I published a short “Research into Practice” piece in JEAP, a piece to which the citational response has been derisory.
3It is not surprising therefore that I heartily welcome ASp’s emphasis on “Teaching practices in ESP” given the disciplinary and personal histories that I have alluded to in the preceding paragraphs. More particularly, in this case we have Dacia Dressen-Hammouda’s account of reconfiguring an established course in professional spoken genres into, as she says, “a multimodal video-based activity”. This remarkable account addresses the needs, concerns and interests of a large undergraduate class, rather than (as is more common) much smaller groups of doctoral students, as in recent articles by the likes of An Cheng, Lisa McGrath and Rafaella Negretti. I should mention, I suppose, that I was Dacia’s PhD advisor, when her research interests lay in geological writing and its acquisition, and wherein her main scholarly reputation resides. So it is gratifying to see her extend her ambit of publications to carefully-crafted exemplars of “Teaching practices in ESP”. Her students, in this piece, were being trained to produce “explainer videos”, those short instructional explanations of how to do things; in my latest case, how to stop the wretched fire-alarm in the basement from beeping like “The cricket in the Hearth”. But I am not going to comment on the technical details of this paper since I am one of the last surviving members of the Analog tribe in the academic universe. Rather, I close by congratulating more generally the journal on its applied initiative and, more specifically, Dr Dressen-Hammouda for responding to the opportunity to bring her “repurposed” course design initiative and its complex rubrics to a wider audience.
John M. Swales
4Since its inception in the late 1970s, the undergraduate Langues étrangères appliquées (LEA) program in Clermont-Ferrand has sought to emphasize its professional orientation by developing an applied, workplace-centered approach to the teaching and learning of language and relevant disciplines so as to make students’ language skills applicable and useful for their professional purposes. While it has always integrated the teaching of cultural contexts, in more recent years the curriculum has moved away from a translation-centered approach (thème-version in spoken and written formats) toward a more integrated literacy and task-based approach to professional communication. In this regard, it now includes semester-long courses organized around specific professional activities and their related genre sets. For example, a course in the third semester (year 2, or N2) is dedicated to the written aspects of running meetings (e.g., emailing to arrange meetings, writing agendas, writing minutes, writing post-meeting memos). A fourth semester course explores the written genres that support sales (e.g., describing products, making inquiries and responding, placing orders, invoices, payment).
5Here I report on a genre-based pedagogical approach recently developed for an existing spoken English N2 course in response to a departmental request to better situate the teaching of spoken professional communication in English within current professional practices. The report will focus specifically on a segment of the revised course which was developed to teach the multimodality inherent in specific spoken professional tasks, notably with regard to the digitization of the professional workplace and growing need for video-creation skills. It describes how a multimodal rubric, designed for teaching and assessing a master’s level video-based learning project (Dressen-Hammouda & Wigham, 2022a, 2022b), can contribute to the assessment of L2 students’ English spoken proficiency.
6The course was taught over a ten-week period with 20 hours of face-to-face classroom interaction; each class session lasted two hours. The course consisted of three segments organized around professional situations: (1) conversing with colleagues, (2) talking to potential customers, and (3) presenting a product or service to potential customers. The segment building toward multimodality and videos (segment 3) took place over the final five class sessions. While around 150 students are typically enrolled in the N2 course, a colleague and I team-taught five sections (roughly 100 students, 20 students per section) during Semester 4 of 2021–2022. Given that our course redesign was in a development phase, only those students from our sections took part in the digital project described in this report.
7The previous course’s objective was to develop students’ overall confidence in speaking English in general professional settings. It included oral and written activities for practicing various types of oral language production: individual, spontaneous, interactive and planned, while targeting specific linguistic skills (grammar, idiomatic expressions, language register) with an emphasis on oral production and listening comprehension. In response to departmental objectives intended to update the teaching of situated spoken professional communication in English, we built on previous course objectives by using genre-based pedagogy with the understanding that genres represent momentarily stabilized language patterns and communicative purposes which are both recognizable by members of an interpretive community and are situated within a specialized sociocultural context. In terms of specific learning outcomes, we worked with our students on the structure and production of spoken professional genres relevant for the workplace, including small-talk exchanges between speakers from different cultures, team meetings, telephone and video calls, pitch presentations and explainer videos.
8A more targeted learning outcome of the revised course was tied to observations about multimodality in professional genres and the digitization of the workplace. In effect, while students must gain proficiency in the traditional spoken language tasks they will be expected to carry out as future workplace professionals (e.g., small talk with colleagues and clients, managing interactions over telephone and video calls, managing and participating in meetings, presenting company products and strategies), it is crucial for students today to also be proficient in adapting their spoken language to the emerging norms of professional digitally mediated multimodal genres, such as video-based genres. In effect, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and multinationals are increasingly seeking professionals who can actively contribute to their digital strategies through the development of online content. One of the most commonly relied upon media in this transformation is video; its pervasiveness can be appreciated by the degree to which companies today recognize that effective communication strategies can no longer exist without video content.
9A report on video marketing statistics collated from a 2021 survey of 582 respondents (Wyzowl 2022) states that 86% of the consulted businesses use video as a marketing tool; an overwhelming majority of marketers (92%) consider video to be an essential part of their marketing strategy. Explainer videos are by far the most common genre (74%), but a wide variety of video-based genres have emerged to meet an ever-increasing number of marketing goals (e.g., social media videos, presentation videos, video testimonials, sales videos, product demos, teaser videos, training videos, etc.). The trend toward video-based communication closely corresponds to customer preferences. According to Wyzowl (2022), 73% of informants stated they would rather watch a short video to learn about a product or service than: read a text-based article, web page or blog post (11%); view an infographic (4%); download an eBook or manual (3%); attend a webinar or pitch (3%); or receive a sales call or demo (3%). When one considers that only 12% of companies contract out to video specialists for their video communication needs, and that 55% create all videos in-house, while another 32% create some videos while outsourcing others (Wyzowl 2022), it becomes clear that the pedagogies deployed today in specialized language teaching for professional purposes must also integrate digitally mediated video-based genres into course design. In other words, it is no longer enough to teach students how to pitch a product in front of a live audience or send out written brochures, even ones with great color, images and layout. Because companies must also deliver that information in dynamic video form, our students must be able to do so, as well.
10To address this pedagogical need, a segment on presenting products and services was integrated into our course design, focusing on similarities and differences between pitch presentations and explainer videos (Table 1, Segment 3). Explainer videos were targeted as relevant to our students’ needs because they are the repurposed digital genre version of pitch presentations, one of the more traditional oral professional genres we wanted to teach. To be clear, our purpose was not to ‘magically’ transform LEA students into video communication specialists, especially given that the overall goal of the course was to help them develop proficiency in spoken English tasks for the company workplace. Rather, the aim was to get them to reflect engagingly about the differences between these professional genres, notably how those differences are expressed using the features of spoken language and other semiotic modes. A related goal was to heighten students’ awareness of the inherent multimodality of professional communication.
11Our approach throughout the ten-week course was grounded in ESP genre-based pedagogy. It linked the teaching of language, genres, and situations both to the LEA program’s wider pedagogical context (i.e. a course in written sales genres taught during the same semester as our course) as well as to the genre sets and variety of speaking situations students could expect to encounter in a professional setting. To this end, the course content was presented as a progression of genre-based tasks organized with increasing complexity (Anthony 2018; GERAS S&A 2014), so as to allow students to gradually build the vocabulary, grammar, phrasal structures, genre knowledge and communicative confidence they would need in order to carry out subsequent, and more complicated, tasks. Each class session was structured using the same procedure: at the start of the session, we presented the professional situation, task and genre to be studied, describing and demonstrating the language patterns and discourse structures used. Students carried out short application exercises before autonomously reproducing the target genre within small groups during the second half of the session.
Table 1 Overview of the ten-week course structure
|
Professional situations
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Session themes based on segments
|
Class sessions
|
|
Segment 1.
|
|
|
|
Conversing with colleagues
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1.1: Managing discussions with colleagues
|
1
|
|
1.2: Running team meetings
|
2–3
|
|
Segment 2.
|
|
|
|
Talking to potential customers
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2.1: Starting and ending telephone and video calls
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4
|
|
2.2: Meeting a client for the first time
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5
|
|
Segment 3.
|
|
|
|
Presenting
a product
or service
to potential customers
|
3.1: How to pitch an idea
|
6
|
|
3.2: How to structure pitch presentations for clients
|
7–8
|
|
3.3: How to adapt pitch presentations as explainer video
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9–10
|
- 1 Professional videos are supposed to be ‘evergreen’, meaning that viewers will look at them in the m (...)
12During Segment 1, students worked on managing discussions with colleagues both informally (i.e. small talk) and formally (i.e. managing and participating in team meetings). Segment 2 helped students plan for talking to potential clients. One session covered telephone and video calls while another was dedicated to the implicit cultural considerations students should be aware of when conversing with clients from different cultures. Segment 3, the focus of this report, gave students practice in orally presenting a company’s products or services. In session 6, students completed short exercises on pitching an idea or a product (either real or invented). Working in small teams of 2–3 people, students then used sessions 7–8 to adapt and deliver a product pitch as a timed five-minute oral presentation using slideware support; students were also asked to produce a written script of their oral presentation they would then transform into speaking notes. In sessions 9–10, students adapted and transformed their oral presentation into a one-to-three-minute explainer video, intended to pitch their product to a wider audience. To help students repurpose their oral presentation as a video-based genre, we looked closely at how formal pitch presentations and explainer videos are similar, but also differ in terms of audience, discourse organization, language formality/informality, temporality,1 rate-of-speech, narration-pausing, intonation, stress, volume and body gestures. To help draw their attention to these features, students were also asked to transform their pitch presentation script for the explainer video and include necessary pausing, intonation and stress markers.
13Session 9 began by describing what makes creating explainer videos challenging, emphasizing the specific nature of the video medium and how difficult it can be to recreate realistic social interaction in that format. Recreating relevant and believable social interaction is a key aspect of successful professional videos; videos that lack social interactional features are often considered uninteresting and viewers can easily ‘click off’ at any time if the video content does not suit their purposes (Dressen-Hammouda & Wigham 2022b). Unlike face-to-face presentations, where one can interact with the audience by both attracting and keeping their attention using eye contact and body posture, the video media is intrinsically devoid of such social interaction cues. Without them, however, viewers have a hard time focusing on content and making sense of it (Mayer 2014). With this in mind, students were instructed that in order to make their videos interesting and relatable to viewers, they needed to ‘re-inject’ a social presence into the video format (or “re-socialize” it) by carefully exploiting key social cues using three elements, personalization, voiceover and animation, described as follows.
14Personalizing the video around a character’s narrative, showing how they deal with a problem that the company’s product or service can help solve taps into people’s innate sensitivity to storytelling. Being able to identify with a video’s character and having a sense of connection with that character pushes viewers to become more receptive to the message being conveyed especially when it is given using a conversational style, as described by multimedia learning specialists (Mayer 2014; Mayer et al. 2004).
15Another closely related element for recreating social context is voiceover. Voice is one of the most important ways of ‘re-socializing’ the video medium. In effect, the human species is instinctively primed for human speech (Paas & Sweller 2014; Pinker 1995); when a voice is ‘interesting’ and ‘engaging’, i.e. conveying appropriate intonation, pitch, pauses and emotion, it naturally causes people to pay attention because they sense they are being addressed directly. Prosody, which includes rhythm (rate-of-speech, pausing), intonation and word stress, plays a crucial role in this process. Because video narration should largely mirror natural speech, getting the ‘rhythms, inflections and intonations’ of conversational English right is a key feature of effective videos (Dressen-Hammouda & Wigham 2022b; van der Meij & Hopfner 2022).
16Good professional explainer videos also show viewers what the product is and what it does. In alignment with research on multimedia learning principles (Paivio, 1986, 2006), presenting information both visually and verbally has been observed to make people more attentive than when presented in a single channel (e.g., language only). In addition, students were told that repeating the exact message using spoken narration and on-screen text should be avoided. In effect, putting written text on-screen and speaking it aloud causes split attention (Mayer & Moreno 1998; van der Meij & Hopfner 2022), or difficulty focusing on the information, resulting in distraction and loss of attention.
17While strict limitations were thus placed on using on-screen text, students were encouraged to choose amongst several options to animate their videos: (1) live-action videos showing real people, animals or computer-generated effects; (2) 2D animation showing motion images including characters, creatures or backgrounds; (3) paper-slide videos using pieces of white paper which are slid across a space while someone video-records it; (4) whiteboard videos showing static images being drawn on a board or screen while a narrator tells the story being drawn; or (5) narrated slideware videos, created using slideware software (PowerPoint, Google slide, etc.) to which students add voiceover narration. Students were encouraged to choose the type of video they thought would be most engaging to work with, taking advantage of the fact that these were introductory classroom creations meant to focus on features of spoken English, not actual professional products according to a client’s specifications.
- 2 Some free video creation platforms include Canva, Loom, Wideo, PowToon, Moovly, Animoto, Animaker a (...)
18A variety of free video-creation platforms were presented, which students could choose from depending on how their team decided to animate their video, what sorts of editing they wanted to do, and whether or not they chose to embed music audio files.2
19Session 10 consisted of a dedicated workshop for putting together the explainer videos: students used the entire two-hour session to collaborate in their teams and ask technical or practical questions. A video-creation worksheet (see Appendix 4) was made available on the Moodle as guidance. It organized students’ video-creation process step-by-step, leading them to (1) identify the explainer video’s communication goal; (2) choose and describe the genre’s target audience; (3) plan the overall structure of the video content; (4) create a storyboard and script; (5) rehearse the video; (6) record the animation and the narration; and (7) make the best choices concerning whether or not to include music. In effect, if the team decided to include music, it should not contain words, and the sound must be low enough to avoid distracting from, drowning or otherwise interfering with the narrator’s voice (van der Meij & Hopfner 2022).
20We emphasized that good scripts and storyboards were key to making effective professional explainer videos. Scripts and storyboards should be prepared at the same time to allow the teams to respect time constraints and ensure that the video narration is delivered smoothly, coherently, and with a logical flow. We explained that the storyboard is not the final design but the skeleton, or basic structure, of the video. It functions like a quality control roadmap showing where to put the video elements and should include: (1) the video genre parts (i.e. situation – challenge – solution – call-to-action); (2) indications of narrated speech and any written text; (3) images; (4) planned animations; and (5) timings. The script itself should map out each sentence to be narrated, and include narration pauses, intonation, stress and volume markings. We reminded the students to mold the language to fit their audiences’ profiles, taking care not to overload their working memory with long sentences (Paas & Sweller 2014).
21As a next step, the students worked from the script to rehearse the delivery. We reminded them that the narration should be engaging and conversational, as if the narrator were talking directly to viewers. The rate-of-speech should be leisurely and include appropriate pauses, intonations and stress. The narration pace should be slightly slower than a typical rate-of-speech (van der Meij & Hopfner 2022). Narrated speech should avoid stutter-starts, hesitations, rambling, and lack of enunciation (Powell 2010). Any words shown on-screen should match the narration exactly. Likewise, the animations shown should be smooth, without any halting between them.
22As a final recommendation, we suggested that the teams practice using their chosen recording tool before recording. When recording, we recommended they record the animation in small segments, combining them during the editing phase. This makes it easier to re-do certain parts without having to re-record everything. Similarly, we emphasized the need to ensure visual and sound quality.
23Students were required to submit two documents for evaluation: their video file and the video narration script, including all appropriate pausing, intonation, volume and stress markers. Our intent was to use the script to assess how well students had planned their video narratives and how well they carried out those intentions (i.e. how well the planned narration matched the recorded voice in the video). We were also interested in targeting individual students’ specific areas of concern in spoken English, including grammar. As mentioned previously, the purpose of the course was not to get students to create professional-level videos, with intricate and elaborate animations and visualizations, but to have them practice transforming the content of one spoken professional genre (pitch presentation) to another (explainer video), in so doing, gaining greater awareness of the features of spoken professional English as well as when and how to adapt them for different situations, audiences and purposes. We were especially concerned with how well students created a human presence in their videos using ‘voice power’ (Powell 2010), including projection, pauses, intonation, and stress and giving the impression of conversationality.
24To provide course instructors with a common ground for evaluating the students’ video productions, a multimodal rubric was adapted from previous studies on teaching and assessing instructional video-tutorials, i.e. professional ‘how-to’ videos created by technical communication professionals. The theoretical background and impetus for the multimodal rubric are explained in Dressen-Hammouda and Wigham (2022a, 2022b); suggestions about the core features which should appear in video-based multimodal rubrics are also provided.
- 3 Mode <https://multimodalityglossary.wordpress.com/>, retrieved 13/05/2022.
25The rubric we used for summative assessment of the explainer videos is shown in table 2 and is organized as follows. In the first column (left), the type of mode is identified. Here, the term ‘mode’ is taken to mean the “set of socially and culturally shaped resources for making meaning a ‘channel’ of representation or communication”.3 Examples of modes include the linguistic mode (written and spoken words, word choice, grammar, sentences, text, etc.), aural mode (speech, sound, music), visual mode (image on the page, moving image, color, typography, animation), spatial mode (proximity, spacing) and gestural mode (gaze, posture in embodied interaction). The rubrics presented in Dressen-Hammouda and Wigham (2022a, 2022b) adopt the New London School’s original five-part modal classification scheme (Cope & Kalantzis 2000), and also include the temporal mode, a crucial characteristic of the video medium. Videos draw on such temporal semiotic resources as length, speed, tempo, pacing, pausing, and temporal cueing. Knowing about temporal modal resources is important for helping students, as non-native speakers of English, get a better sense of the key features of conversational English to be conveyed through the narration. In effect, prosody, while a feature of spoken language, is closely linked to temporal resources.
Table 2 Multimodal rubric used for explainer video summative assessment, scored on 20 points (adapted from Dressen-Hammouda & Wigham, 2022a, 2022b)
26The rubric also reflected particular course contents. For example, information was included about submission requirements (‘Format’), although format is not a ‘mode’. Likewise, some of the terms used by multimodality specialists were considered less helpful to our students. We thus replaced ‘linguistic mode’ by ‘organization’, and broke down the aural mode into three parts: narration, spoken language control and sound/music. Two other modes included were the visual and temporal modes; for simplification, the spatial and gestural modes were excluded from the rubric. In effect, it was concluded that there was already enough detail for students to focus on in our feedback without additional attention paid specifically to spatial organization or to facial and body movement. Nevertheless, for live-action videos, criteria 22 could be used to address the general concerns raised in class about body language (i.e. taking care not to pace or move around the screen).
27The second column on the left describes the specific competencies, or communicative goals, taught during the course, while the fourth column describes the ways in which the modal competencies should be carried out, i.e. what is important for their successful implementation. Thirty competency criteria were identified for the purposes of our assessment. Column 5 allows evaluators to quickly indicate whether or not the criteria have been met (Y/N).
28Given our emphasis on oral speaking skills, we wanted to pay particular attention to students’ demonstration that those skills had been acquired, as reflected in criteria 8–12 (‘making the video and narration socially oriented’), 13–14 (‘exercising good grammatical control’), 15–16 (‘exercising good pronunciation, intonation and stress’), and 29–30 (‘managing narration pacing’). Two other modal competencies specifically targeted in our teaching and assessment relate to thinking about audience and establishing a clear genre structure (criteria 5–7). Finally, although the focus of the course was not on video design per se, we did want to provide some feedback to students on how well their videos held together as a whole, hence the decision to also include feedback on other modes and skills (criteria 17–28). An example of an instructor’s summative assessment and feedback is found in Appendix 3.
29In this section, I will briefly describe the impact of the video project on student motivation and assess the usability and potential of the multimodal rubric for teaching and evaluating ESP video-based digital projects.
30Overall, students’ impressions about the project were overwhelmingly positive despite the complexity of putting together an explainer video for the first time. Although only informal feedback was sought as students worked through the steps of the video creation process, their motivation and engagement are clearly reflected in the time, care and creativity evident in their final video productions. Figure 1 shows screen captures from one of the student video-based projects; it includes notations from the script devised by students to guide their spoken narration during recording. The full version of the animated video, corresponding script with students’ notation key and summative evaluation rubric can be found in Appendices 1–3. Informed consent was obtained from the students to use their productions for research and training purposes.
31The attractiveness of video-based learning projects for students and teachers in languages for specific purposes has, of course, been well detailed in the L2 literature (Birch-Becaas 2021; Biros & Fries 2021; Hafner & Miller 2011; Hoskins 2022; Peake & Reynolds 2020) given the powerful impact such creative projects have on driving student motivation and engagement with important consequences for language learning (Liu et al. 2016; Noels et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2021). As much as traditional paper-based literacy tasks encourage language-learning processes, such as noticing, reflection on language and cognitive comparison (Manchón 2017), multimodal design further supports language learning because of its “true demand for formulation, i.e. a real struggle to transform ideas into language, a process propitious to language development because of the learning mechanisms it [activates], and the corresponding … changes in the L2 user’s underlying linguistic system it [induces]” (Manchón 2017: 94). We have found these observations to also apply to video-based projects. In future course implementations, we plan to further investigate the effects of studying multimodality with students by examining how the rubric, used for formative self- and peer assessment, might promote students’ critical awareness of spoken English features, including an awareness of students’ own prosody and confidence as extended to other planned and semi-spontaneous professional speaking situations, such as live presentations, telephone and video calls, and managing and participating in online meetings.
Figure 1 Screen captures and notated script from student-produced video project
32In particular, following results from Dressen-Hammouda and Wigham (2022a, 2022b), we would expect for the multimodal rubric to play an important role in redirecting students’ attention to the features of spoken English and multimodal interactions when introduced as part of the course and made available as guidance during the video design process. In our pedagogical context, because the rubric was created at the end of the course for summative evaluation purposes, it was not available for student use. We anticipate that the multimodal rubric would be instrumental in helping students better target the aspects of spoken English which support social interaction and facilitate collaboration in international workplace settings.
33A final point concerns the multimodal rubric’s usefulness for teachers in evaluating student performance and providing feedback. The rubric was used by both course instructors to evaluate and provide feedback on videos produced by 41 student teams; we spent approximately 20–25 minutes per video, which can be considered equivalent to the time typically spent evaluating final written papers or timed essays. It allowed us to quickly focus our attention during the video viewing on the specific points of interest we wanted to target in students’ oral language production. In particular, the rubric’s structure enabled us to pay particular attention to prosody, pronunciation, overall grammatical correctness and flow, and tailor comments accordingly. At the same time, we also provided feedback on other modal competencies by indicating those specific skills in the Y/N column without necessarily making them the focus of our assessment. Future implementations of the course, which we consider to be a work-in-progress, will integrate the rubric as part of the course’s formative assessment, allowing us to examine these issues more closely by targeting their potential in providing students with opportunities to exercise their capacities as autonomous learners within a structured language-learning context.
The author would like to thank her colleague, Kevin Petit, for his invaluable collaboration in course design, as well as testing and commenting on the multimodal rubric for his assessment purposes.
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