Using Film in the EFL Classroom

Doina Morari ,Access Program

Assistant

How can film help you teach English?

• Learning from films is motivating and enjoyable• Film provides authentic and varied language• Film gives a visual context• Variety and flexibility• Exposes the students to spoken language• Useful in teaching vocabulary • It contextualizes language through the flow of

images, making it more accessible • Film also offers an enlargement of our knowledge

of the world and the cultures that it contains. • http://www.britishcouncil.org/blog/how-can-film-help-you-teach-or-learn-english

How to Use Films in Teaching?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ExwaPaHSdM

How to Use Films in Teaching?

1. Find something you like2. Choose something you can understand 70-

90% of (without subtitles or other help)3. Don’t use subtitles in your own language4. Watch several times5. Start with English subtitles, then watch again

without subtitles.6. You don’t have to spend a lot of time- ten

minutes a day is better than nothing.

Activit ies

Jeopardy

https://jeopardylabs.com/play/ultimate-harry-potter-jeopardyCreate your own: https://jeopardylabs.com/

Story promptsMake up cards with words from a movie that your students had to watch. During the lesson, invite a student to come in front of the classroom. His task is to come up with a story using the words from the cards he extracts one by one. Another variant of this activity is to make up a story together with all the students. One by one, the students extract a card, and have to make up a sentence with the word each has got. They also have to be attentive to the previous sentences since they are supposed to create a coherent story.

Voice the Characters Vision On/Sound Off (Silent Viewing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTQi-VvGZTA

Invite the students to watch an episode from a move without sound. Their task is to voice the characters and to suggest what

the they are saying in that particular episode.

Characters

Margo Minion

Agnes

Edith

Gru

The Clothespin Game This game is very good for checking how attentive the students were while

watching the movie. Invite a student in front of the classroom. Put some clothespins on him. The class has to ask their colleague film-related questions. If he answers one correctly, he has the right to take a clothespin off. If not, he will give answers to more questions until he will give enough correct answers to get

rid of all the pins. The task of the whole class is to keep the person who is in front of the classroom there as long as possible.

Role Play• Great scenes• Episodes that were not included in the

final script (the students come up with those scenes)

• Favorite scenes• Come up with other conflict solutions• Imagine that the characters lived in a

different epoch. How would they react to the situations they find themselves then?

• Come up with another ending

Character Interview

• Students role play a press conference in which reporters

interview characters from a film

Dear Film Friend• The students write a letter to a

character in a film.

Famous Film Lines• Students match famous lines of film dialogue with the

names of the actors who said them.

http://www.filmsite.org/topquotes.html