This chapter looks at the role of voice-overs, subtitles, captions, scripts, screenplays and thought bubbles – in other words, the text that accompanies a video sequence. The popularity of today's ‘silent movies’ (videos that include no written or spoken word at all) on YouTube and Vimeo has meant that many teachers have forgotten or overlooked the importance of exploiting text and image. It is easy to get seduced by the beauty of these silent clips, many of which are emotionally charged and supported by moving soundtracks. However, the techniques by which these short and silent clips are exploited tend to be repetitive, for example, memorization or description of the visual stimuli. They often don't engage higher-order thinking skills.

For me, it is precisely its multi-modal quality that makes the moving image such a rich medium. One of the most positive contributions that the moving image has made in recent times is the way that it can enhance and bring to life a text of some complexity. In this respect, visual poems and visual adaptations of lectures can help these texts reach a wider and a more diverse audience.(See Activity 1.7: Dialogues for ideas on how to exploit these kinds of multi-modal texts and Activity 5.5: Memory as an example of a visual poem.)

Working with the text alongside the moving image is nothing new in language teaching. A technique that was first popularized by the advent of the communicative approach was the information gap, in which the class was divided: for example, half the class watched the screen (without sound) while others read the script or subtitles. However, apart from being logistically complicated to arrange in class, I found that such tasks didn't motivate learners a great deal. There clearly was an information gap to be completed and this generated a fair amount of language; however, learners didn't have to create a text themselves to do the activity but simply summarize or reformulate what had been said by others.

What the following tasks have in common is that the learners are creating their own texts, categorizations or visualizations. This should motivate them to then check against the original version and notice any differences or similarities between their version and the ‘real thing’. In fact, ‘noticing’ is a common thread running through a number of the tasks in this chapter.