Have you ever wondered how to use movies in your ESL
classes, without just sitting your students down in front of the screen, hitting
'Play' and sitting back to watch?
Here are a few ideas to get you started, using very short
movie extracts to present and practise new language and develop communicative
skills.
1 No picture
Choose a short extract (2 or 3 minutes) with plenty of sound
effects. Play it with the screen covered or turned away from the students, and
ask them to write down what they hear.
If two of the sound effects are birds singing and a baby crying, you
could use the extract to present or practice any of these language points (and
I'm sure you can think of more):
Some birds are singing / A baby is crying
Some birds were singing / A baby was crying
It must / might / can't be birds singing or It must / might
/ can't have been birds singing
I heard some birds singing / I heard a baby crying
After playing the extract, have students compare what they
heard in pairs, and then elicit the language from them. Remember to show the
extract with both picture and sound at the end of the activity to satisfy the students'
curiosity!
2 No sound
Here's the opposite idea. Show a short extract (again, 2 or
3 minutes is enough) with a lot going on, or where the characters convey a lot
of emotion in their expressions, but play it with the volume off. Students can
then do one of the activities below without having to worry about understanding
dialogue:
Describe what happened using narrative tenses
Describe the scene
Anticipate dialogue or reactions
Arrange a cut-up dialogue which you have given them.
Finally, play the extract again with sound. Having done one
of these tasks, your students will be able to fit what they hear into a context
much more effectively than if they had viewed the extract initially with
picture and sound.
3 Jigsaw viewing
You may have done jigsaw reading activities in your class,
where students have half the information and share what they have read with
another student to recreate the whole story. You can also do this with short
video sequences in a number of ways:
Half the class watches with no picture, then the other half
with no sound (you'll have to take half the students out of the class in each
case). In pairs, they then question each other to recreate the scene.
Half the class have picture and sound, the other half just
have sound. You can do this by sitting students in two rows, back to back, so
that only one row can see the screen. The half who only had sound then question
the other half.
One student listens with headphones, while all the others
view without sound. The student with headphones questions the others to
recreate the scene.
4 Viewing on rewind
Choose a short sequence with a lot of action. For example, a
woman enters an apartment, picks up the telephone, listens, looks terrified,
runs out of her apartment and down the stairs, and runs off down the
street. Movies are, of course, a great
source for this sort of material. Play the scene backwards to the students (DVD
gives more flexibility than video with the speed of playback) then have them
reconstruct the story in chronological order, using narrative tenses, or future
tenses, or whatever you want the linguistic focus to be. Finally, play the
sequence normally so students can compare it with their version.
5 Pause / Freeze Frame
If you use pictures in your classroom for introducing new
vocabulary, or for describing people and scenes, you can add a new dimension to
this with the pause/freeze frame button of your video or DVD player. Hit pause
when a character has an interesting expression on his or her face is about to
react to something or answer a question, or when there is a lot of colourful
new vocabulary on the screen. Have
students describe the character/scene, or anticipate what the character will
say or do next. Release the pause button
to allow students to compare their ideas with what actually happens.
Video is a motivating and effective way to bring variety to
your ESL classes. Using short, sharp
sequences with a clear linguistic focus, your students will go away from your
class with much more than if you sit them down in front of the screen and hit
'play'.
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