Indeed, in his Preface Christopher Brumfit wonders if the medium will ‘follow the fate of language laboratories and distract teachers from a central concern for their relationship with students and the language which results from that relationship’. However, as he also notes, contributors to the volume seem aware of this danger and are anxious to ‘accommodate video within the mainstream of language teaching’. Different chapters offer state-of-the-art surveys of practice, more theoretical contributions which situate video use in relation to other media or in relation to spoken discourse in general (there are notable contributions by Dave and Jane Willis in these areas), and descriptions of specific classroom activities with video. There is a consistent concern throughout the collection with issues of copyright where video-recording of broadcast materials is concerned but an equally strong appreciation of the potential value of video when such problems can be overcome.
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