Showing Movies in the EFL Classroom
My Spanish teacher from high school used to reach into his Disney vault every Friday and pick out a nice pelicula to subject us to. As a student, I loved these days, because I could play Bomberman on my TI calculator after making a quick list of 20 words I recognized from the movie. As a teacher, I realize this may not be the best way to practice English. The dialogue is usually too fast for students to keep up with, but if you turn on Chinese subtitles, then nobody pays attention to what is being spoken. I run into the same problem when I watch a Chinese movie with English subtitles.
Now if I were a cool teacher, I wouldn’t worry about this, just play a movie, and let the students sleep during class.
But I’m not.
There is some merit in letting your class watch a film, then asking them to describe it afterwards. A 90-minute movie takes three class periods to get through, though, and a lot of details are lost in the wait. Even with a shorter TV show, it’s hard to remember the smaller nuances of what happened that add up to great fluency. That’s why I love Shaun the Sheep. Every episode is only seven minutes long and contains no talking, so the emphasis is all on the actions. I hate frequently starting/stopping a movie, but in the case of Shaun, the story’s over, and the next one won’t start until we’ve spent seven (or more) minutes talking about what we just saw.
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