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Sentence Completions with Digital Video Task: From Theory to Classroom Practice

Rong Liu, John Unger, & Sarah Schlueter

Published Online: 20 June 2022

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ABSTRACT

Adopting Tomasello’s (2003) usage-based language acquisition theory, this case study presents sentence-completions-with-digital-video as a potential task to enhance language learning. Data were collected from two students who were enrolled in a college-level English for Academic Purposes course. In the sentence-completions-with-digital-video task, students completed a sentence with a target academic word and created another sentence that supports the meaning of the word. Students then recorded a digital video explaining how and why the first sentence supports the second sentence. A detailed analysis of the exemplar cases showed that the task helped students learn the academic word and cohesion and gave students opportunities to detect errors. The limited data also show evidence of metacognition under the framework of Scribner’s (1997) Conceptual Levels. The action-oriented case study provided preliminary evidence that the sentence-completions-with-digital-video task can be a useful teaching tool to promote vocabulary learning, sentence cohesion building, and metacognition cultivation.

KEYWORDS: sentence completions, Digital Video (DV), usage-based language acquisition, metacognition

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