INTRODUCTION

The teacher plays a key role in the success or failure of any video used in the language classroom. It is the teacher who selects the video, relates the video to students' needs, promotes active viewing, and integrates the video with other areas of the language curriculum. Any video's chances of achieving the important goals of motivating students' interest, providing realistic listening practice, stimulating language use, and heightening students' awareness of particular language points or other aspects of communication can be improved or destroyed by the way in which the teacher introduces the video and the activities which the students carry out in conjunction with viewing.

Video is an extremely dense medium, one which incorporates a wide variety of visual elements and a great range of audio experiences in addition to spoken language. This can be baffling for many students. The teacher is there to choose appropriate sequences, prepare the students for the viewing experience, focus the students' attention on the content, play and replay the video as needed, design or select viewing tasks, and follow up with suitable postviewing activities.

Published language teaching video materials usually provide guidance for teachers. Indeed, the most sophisticated of these are usually part of a multimedia package that, in addition to the videos themselves, includes viewing guides, student textbooks, teacher manuals, and audiocassettes.