Integrating language, intercultural and digital skills in a teacher training programme through home-made videos

Adapting and producing teaching materials is part of teaching. Using and creating video for language learning support comprehension and the linguistic performance of students. The idea of home-made one-minute educational video clips oriented on language, culture or communication is well grounded in language learning pedagogy (Willis D. 1983; Lonergan 1984; Coombe & Kinney 1999; Hill 1999). Such videos integrate language skills, intercultural competence, and digital skills. They also make repetitive tasks such as rehearsal or rote learning attractive and motivating. Through situated learning procedures student teachers learn how to create their own learning environment, and how to incorporate their own and their pupils’ schemata into language learning. In a study conducted in Poland, home-made video clips were introduced into a teacher training programme to develop digital and media competence in a holistic way. The study analysed the production of over 250 video-clips made by pre-service teachers of languages as part of their teacher training course. The clips were intended for a variety of educational purposes, e.g. introducing new language, illustrating usage, enhancing practice, documenting performance, and assessment, and were produced over a period of six years (2008–2014). They used subtitles, intertitles, and narrative revoicing a story to achieve their educational aim. The ability to produce home-made video-based activities as materials for teaching and learning languages require integration of various skills and competences. The results show that pre-service teachers are able to integrate their professional knowledge with intercultural competence and digital skills to enhance a variety of teaching techniques including the creation of multimodal texts.