Rowan Samoilov

1. Your research explores video-making as a collaborative activity in EFL classrooms. What motivated you to investigate this approach?
I asked myself, what do I and many of my students and friends do every day that is underused in language learning, and one of the answers was "YouTube". Watching videos as part of language learning is used and researched more extensively though than making videos, and I have still encountered many people who do it, as this technology is now available to everyone. So I decided to learn more about its use in the classroom.

2. How can student-created videos contribute to language development beyond traditional classroom activities?
According to existing studies, collaborative video-making can not only foster collaboration like many other collaborative tasks, but also facilitate feedback exchange and peer-learning through watching and commenting student-created videos, improve students’ confidence in public speaking, improve (public) speaking skills, teach students to use technology to complete real-world tasks, improve language learning motivation and give students joy and other positive emotions.

3. Your study examines classroom interaction during collaborative projects. What interesting patterns of learner interaction emerged from your research?
The most common interaction type was organizational, which is language used to organize and manage collaboration, divide tasks, give instructions, etc. This shows active involvement in collaborative work, however, most of it took place in the students’ native language. Students also frequently expressed their emotions, mainly positive emotions visible from their laughter and jokes, which was heavily influenced by class dynamics. The high amount of evaluative language showed the activities can facilitate feedback-giving.

4. What challenges might teachers encounter when introducing video-making projects, and how can these challenges be addressed?
Notable challenges included lack of time or difficulty in time management, difficulty and lack of confidence when presenting on camera, student absences during parts of the projects, which affected the overall project flow, student disengagement, stress, dissatisfaction with the product and noise distractions when filming. These challenges can be addressed with specific instruction (for example, on saving the data so that it is accessible in case of absences, explicit teaching of presentation, filming or time-management skills, etc.) or adjusting the tasks (allocating more time, focusing on engagement when designing tasks, etc.).

5. What advice would you give teachers who would like to incorporate project-based learning and digital creativity into their lessons?
It is important to learn from colleagues who have already done it in their classes, address the known challenges and adjust to those that might emerge in the future. For example, it has not come up much in my study, but with the current availability of AI tools, I believe that it is important to focus primarily on process rather than product. What matters is that students engage with language creatively and use tech tools for their benefit rather than as a simple shortcut to a result.