in the ESL classroom

The increasing quality and ever growing presence of technology in and outside the classroom allows teachers to experiment with new forms of lesson delivery, from video production (Gromik, 2007), to blogging (Pinkman, 2005) and teacher produced podcasts (Diem, 2005). Recently however a new form of lesson delivery is becoming available. During the JALT CALL 2006 conference, Allard and Gromik presented a workshop about creating video tutorials using Camtasia. Following up on this workshop, this article describes a current research project that presents Camtasia-based video tutorials about software operation to English as Foreign Language (EFL) Japanese learners. V ideo tutorials are not a new concept, emerging in the late 1960s, when Bandu-ra first commented on the issue of self-modeling (Hitchcock, Dowrick & Prater, 2003). Since then, video modeling has been described as “instructional videos” or “video tutorials. ” Most video tutorials are produced as a strategy to promote guid-ance in developing new skills and abilities, for example, to improve teacher training (da Silva, 2005) or to prepare medical students for their internship experience (Lee, Jacobs & Kamin, 2006). Also video tutorials have been used to assess their effectiveness in improving students learning efficacy (Zhang, Zhou, Briggs & Nunamaker Jr., 2006). Since their release, video tutorials have established a new presence online mostly fo