Batlle J. Interview with Paul Seedhouse on VEO

This article is an interview with Dr Paul Seedhouse, lead researcher of the European Project VEO. The project team are working with an app created by a Newcastle University spin-off company (VEO Ltd), which can be used by various professions including teaching, business and medicine, for training and research purposes. It enables users to video sessions (classes, for example) and set up the app to tag recordings according to the user’s requirements. In the interview, Dr Seedhouse explains that the app is likely to be useful for education researchers, or for teachers who wish to reflect on their own lessons, perhaps considering the level of motivation of their students during lessons, considering types of questions asked, teacher talking time, among other possibilities. Dr Seedhouse points out that the tagging that the app performs is not Conversation Analysis per se but once you have the data from the app, you can then transcribe the data to carry out whatever type of analysis you need.  

At the time of the interview, the project was working on developing tags for specific uses; they have tags for language teaching already, but they want to expand. They hope the app will be useful for researchers of language use in the real world too.

This app provides one possible solution to how to observe classrooms (for example) in the most unobtrusive way possible; most people are used to seeing smartphones and tablets and are less likely to modify their behaviour than they might with video cameras in the classroom. Furthermore, video recordings (as opposed to audio recordings) mean that analysis can also consider gestures and other physical aspects of spoken communication. Together with the tagging system, whereby the user can easily identify points of interest in the recording, this app could be groundbreaking for anyone interested in educational technology.

Dr Seedhouse’s research focuses on the use of Conversation analysis (CA) in language classrooms and you can read more about his earlier work here:

He also wrote an article in 2010 (here) that all of us should read carefully as it considers how different research methodologies can come to very different conclusions:

In my context of online language learning and teaching, I will be following the project’s work (they post regularly in Twitter and Facebook and their website - https://veoeuropa.com/ - has up-to-date news too); we moved from audio to video several years ago and the tagging system looks to be a valuable instrument for research purposes as well as for teacher training.

Jackie Robbins