Movies provide very authentic teaching material that engages students in real-life conversation in ESL and EFL classrooms. Authentic movies provide real-life contexts for students to learn language and paralanguage and to encounter cross-cultural information (Braddock, 1996; Mejia, Xiao, & Kennedy, 1994; Stempleski & Tomalin, 2001). For learning language, movies provide students with opportunities to develop a wide range of linguistic and semilinguistic skills (Macknight, 1981). They also give students opportunities to be exposed to different native and nonnative speaker voices, slang, reduced speech, stress and intonation patterns, accents, and dialects. Movies provide linguistic resources such as vocabulary, grammar, and various discourse (Sherman, 2003), and they also guide students to focus on the most important aspects of language learning because words and phrases are repeated, and therefore students develop schematic knowledge while watching movies.

Our 2012 TESOL presentation was based on theory, pedagogical experimentation, and a 2-year student survey. We discussed how to select appropriate movies for learners depending on their content, clarity of dialogue, language used, and movie genre and register.

We described five new activities for both traditional and online video ESL classes: Listeners and Watchers, Grammar Implementation, Reenacting Activity, Idioms Preview and Practice, and Character Map. These activities help students learn and reinforce linguistic forms and idioms and vocabulary previously learned. Listeners and Watchers and Reenacting Activity encourage students to discuss individual scenes of movies. Character Map promotes discussion of movies generally as students discuss their favorite characters. In Grammar Implementation students practice listening concurrently while practicing grammar patterns, language forms, and vocabulary they have previously studied. Finally, in Idiom Preview and Practice students are given lists of idioms and vocabulary they will hear in the next scene together with explanations, sample sentences, and practice activities. We also discussed an online course; students watched the movie Serendipity with their own DVD and then used materials like those discussed above for classrooms, which they accessed at our website. We provided feedback as they sent us answers. You may access our website at https://sites.google.com/site/2012videoesl/.

References

Braddock, B. (1996). Using films in the English class. Hemel Hempstead, England: Phoenix ELT.

Macknight, F. (1981). Review and analysis of present video use in EFL teaching (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of Wales, Cardiff.

Mejia, E., Xiao, M. K., & Kennedy, J. (1994). 102 very teachable films: A teacher's reference guide to using movies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson ESL.

Sherman, J. (2003). Using authentic video in the language classroom. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Stempleski, S., & Tomalin, B. (2001). Film. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

SoHee Kim is a doctoral student at Korea University as well as a lecturer in academic English at Gachon University. She taught a video ESL class with Terry Doyle in the fall of 2010 and has been teaching listening and speaking skills to ESL learners online. Her main interests are media literacy and language assessment. She has given many presentations related to CALL at CATESOL and TESOL conventions.

Terry Doyle has been teaching ESL at City College of San Francisco for more than 30 years. He holds an EdD in international and multicultural education from the University of San Francisco. Besides his interest in teaching ESL using movies and soap operas, both in the classroom and online, and in creating materials for this kind of teaching, he is interested in nonnative-English-speaking teacher issues and teacher education.