Key Considerations In Providing Feedback On Video Script Writing

Abstract

The Digital Literacy Lab at the Centre for Applied English Studies at HKU has been working in partnership with coordinators of Common Core and faculty courses to help students with assignments that have a digital component, for example, a video or digital story, podcast, poster, or pre-recorded presentation. The purpose of this is to enhance students’ overall communicative competence in increasingly multimodal contexts by enabling them to see how written, spoken, visual, and digital literacies converge to produce a coherent text. This paper will describe the key issues learners face in the scripting of video commentary by focusing on two courses: 1) The Science of Crime Investigation and 2) Hong Kong Culture in the Context of Globalization. While in the first course, students work in groups to produce a video to recreate a crime scene by interpreting scientific evidence and communicating their findings effectively through visual and written means, in the second, they work on a digital story to examine a cultural heritage site or icon in Hong Kong. After outlining the main problems students face in writing the video script, the paper will provide suggestions for readers in the form of practical examples of feedback provided by teachers, to help students improve their writing. Summary This paper will focus on students from two different Common Core courses at HKU working in groups towards their video-production assignment. It will examine their video scripts with the aim of suggesting useful ways of providing valuable feedback to help students improve their writing.