Impact of Utilizing Videos to Enhance the Students' Communication Competence in German as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Learning foreign languages has become a new trend among undergraduates at the University of Kelaniya during past few years. Most of the students wish to learn a foreign language as an asset for their future career. The number of German language learners at the university is increasing year by year. Today the main aim of learning a language is the communication. Therefore the communicative competence of language learners plays a vital role. Appropriate communicating skills by using target language is a major challenge for foreign language learners. Moreover, students often find it challenging to adapt to the creativity, fluency and flexibility of target language. At the same time teachers face the challenge of enhancing the oral competence of the learners in the target language. Thus, teachers need to integrate digital support i.e. videos, dialogues, short films to enhance the oral skills of the students. This paper focuses on the impact of utilizing videos in the German as a Foreign Language classroom to enhance the communicative competence of target group. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of using video materials parallel to the reading text to enhance speaking skills in the target language. Data were collected from 20 undergraduates who are studying German as a foreign language in their third year at the University of Kelaniya. Classroom observations, discussions with students and lecturers who are teaching German as a foreign language and author’s own experience were considered in gathering further data. At the final stage of the lecture, students should to do a productive exercise activity such as role-playing, debate, dialogues, spontaneous presentation etc. from what they have learned through video and the printed text. Such activities are regularly integrated and results of the study reflect that application of relevant videos for a text is an effective teaching method to arouse interest of the students. At the same time through this interest it increased interaction among students was observed. The result was appropriate fluency and communicative ability. There should be a correspondence between printed text and video material to obtain a better results. Furthermore, it is recommended that this strategy is adopted in other foreign language classrooms to enhance communicative competence of learners in target language