Click Here to Subsribe to the 'Teaching Techniques' Feed Many of my fellow ESL teachers are afraid to show movies in their classroom.
“Why?” I ask.
“We weren’t hired to show movies,” they always say. “We are supposed to teach.”
They are right, of course. A television is no substitute for a teacher. Yet, my students with the best pronunciations and vocabulary tell me that they owe their proficiency to watching English movies. I believe them. Learing English while watching life events unfold is a very good way to retain new expressions and sentence structures.
If your school has the technological capabilities to show movies in the classroom, I would suggest that you take advantage of the opportunity. Not everyday of course. Not even every week. In fact, you can use the possibility of showing a movie as an incentive for students to pay attention and do well in your class.
Unless you have an unusually long class period, you would probably only have time to show half of a film at best. You should choose a part of the movie which you feel is the most beneficial to your students on their quest to improve their English.
What kind of movies should you show in class? That depends, of course, on the age group of your students. For children, I would suggest that you show a cartoon or Pixar film. Teenagers would probably enjoy seeing contemporary action movies or love stories (with minimal violence and sex), while adults would enjoy just about anything. Just make sure you that you show a movie that has alot of English speaking in it. ‘Mr Bean’s Holiday’, for example, may be a very funny movie, but it contains too little speaking for it to be a worthwhile ESL tool.
Whatever you show, it is a good idea to ask your students to write down some new words and expressions that they hear. If you have enough time, you can even prepare a brief Q & A sheet for them to have on their desks as they watch the movies. You should leave yourself 10 minutes before the end of the class to discuss the movie with your students.
If your boss or another teacher questions your decision to show your class an English movie now and then, politely explain that you are helping your students to understand Western cultre better as well as improve their vocabulary. It is as simple as that!
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Teaching With Movies
With an appreciable increase in the use of movies or captioned films to teach English as a foreign language in China, the authors embarked upon a four-year experiment to determine the efficacy of using English language movies to teach business to Chinese students. It became clear that a cavalier use of movies is an abuse of the use of movies since the appropriate use of movies requires many elements: 1. Typical movies that are educational, informative and entertaining is the first condition in successful movie teaching; 2. A functional workbook to the movies for the students to prepare before watching the movies is the second condition for effective teaching through movies. 3. Various classroom activities to induce/elicit timely and optimal output from students is the last but most important condition to create an acquisition environment for communication. Activities such as dubbing, story retelling, acting, discussing, debating, role playing, etc are but a few proved very effective techniques the teacher can employ to engage the students.
English Today, Volume 23, Issue 02, Apr 2007 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1036144
http://www.usingenglish.com/esl-in-china/
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