DOI: 10.12731/wsd-2014-9.2-21 UDC 371
MOVIES AS A TOOL FOR ELT Bochkova O.S.
Background. The challenge of learning a foreign language has always been topical. The advantages of using digital video movies in the English classroom are as follows: the use of videos gives a break from the teacher to the variety of authentic English.
Purpose, materials and methods. If films are available for independent viewing, discuss strategies with students. It your institution has 193 a film library, self-access viewing facilities and an active viewing population, you can go for independent film study. The film should be approached as a text, as a book. First, you discuss the movie in advance, make students aware of what they would be watching. Then you develop handouts with tasks and exercises for the movie.
Findings. Movies attract the people to imitate the English speaking behavior; including accent, pronunciation, hand writing, and etc. and therefore lead to higher language proficiency.
Conclusion. Video materials enhance students' language competence and motivation to language learning.
Keywords: video, drama, ESP, conversation, dialog, language learning, communication.
Introduction
English teachers have been using videos in the classroom for decades and, more recently DVDs and online video. It seems that using films is the best mean for the teacher of English to motivate the student of English and get him/her involved. The most obvious reason for using video drama is that language students usually want it. It is not an indulgence or a frill but central to language learmng.
Background
One reason why it is so important for language learning is that it is a window into culture. For instance, there are some settings which highlight particular sectors, e.g. American presidential elections, the stock exchange, criminal courts, Australian suburbia, army life, and these can be especially useful in ESP and project work. Period settings, too, are now so well-researched that they are as good as a visit to a museum. But even more important are the minutiae of daily life -body language, styles of dress, table manners, gender roles, how people treat their children or talk to their bosses - and indeed the whole feeling of the social landscape, which is particularly strong in realistic soap operas (Body language, Character network, Culture, Dossier, Fly on the wall, Lifestyle, Organization man). The fact that this behaviour is unmarked and unremarked in film drama (just taken for granted), makes it particularly convincing. My Italian students, for example, refused to believe the English could be so eccentric as to eat biscuits with their cheese after a meal, but I showed them - in a sitcom!
Materials and methods of the research
A lot of film drama is set in a fantasy world where the people
are rich and white, the men are heroic and the women beautiful, boy-meets-girl ends in true love, and criminals are brought snarling to justice after elaborate car chases. But this set of formulas and cliches is also part of our general culture, copied and parodied by the media world, and can be explored with pleasure and profit in class (Make a case, Oscar, Plan a chase, Plot idea 1, Schema, Sequel and prequel, Your movie). So, we used observation and experiment methods in our research.
Aim of the research. The aim of our research was revealing the impact of using video drama in language learning.
The research results and their discussion
Video drama reflects major cultural movements (e.g. changing percep-tions of women), but it also creates culture (witness icons like Mickey Mouse). Much of the popular knowledge shared by the English-speaking world comes from feature films on general release: many people would never have known about Karen Blixen or idiots savants without Out of Africa and Rainman. And this culture is now global. Many English-language soap operas and drama series have also found an international market. Thus understanding video drama is an entry ticket to the English-speaking world, on a par with reading newspapers and magazines, writing business letters, having conversations and other major language activities found in EFL coursebooks. It should, like them, be regarded as a language-learning goal in its own right.
There are equally strong arguments on the linguistic front. First, understanding is that much easier because the language is interpreted in full visual context. Events, setting, actions, expressions, gestures
in a scene give a dense immediate context which highlights meaning, both literal and pragmatic. We see the angry face which says 'You'd better believe it' or the shrug that goes with 'I couldn't care less' (Body language, Holophrases, Lipreading and mindreading, Speech acts). Moreover, the language is directly linked to the feelings, situations and speakers which inspire it, and this full social context gives access to the full meaning (Purrs and slurs, What's going on?). As we watch, we also gradually accumulate an understanding of the whole story, the narrative context; this opens up the significance of the words in the action as a whole (Jumbled statements Variation, Quotes, Speculations Variation 3). This may seem obvious, but remember that language learners to some extent view life (and film) upside down. Expert speakers make use of the language to understand the action; learners frequently have to use the action to understand the language. Most listening comprehension exercises for language learners are brief, one-off and purely aural and don't provide these essential aids, the dense visual and social context and the in-depth experience of what has gone before, which make drama film the nearest thing most foreign-language students have to real-life experience of spoken meaning.
A second reason for using film drama in language learning is the kind of language that drama provides «interactive language, the language of daily conversational exchange.
Interaction is relatively neglected in course-books above elementary level. One reasons is that it is very difficult to bring a wide range of interactive language into the classroom, e.g. you cannot expect teachers or students to gloat, needle, sound people out, beat about the bush, hint, probe, flatter, fawn, threaten, stall, scream, blue murder -at least not to order! As a result, learners who have not stayed in an
English-speaking country or community arc often unable to produce natural spoken English. When asked to role play or script a dialogue, they frequently produce strange scholastic language, inappropriate tone, distorted idioms, unlikely collocations and above all a limited repertoire of functional language and colloquial phraseology. Another result is that students lack the language for describing speech events and acts, and the reactions» and maneuvers of conversation (e.g. Could I have a word?; you flatter yourself; that's blackmail; I was really taken aback; take me through that again), a major vocabulary area essential to daily conversation (Best scene, Diary, Favourite scene, Feeling flow, Fly on the wall, Gossip, Heard and seen Variation, Speech acts, What's going on?).
Only video drama can provide this range of language in our educational environment, and students need such exposure because to learn to speak to people they must see and hear people speaking to each other. More limited, less contextualized input such as sets of functional phrases and mini-dialogues is not in fact the best way to help students produce appropriate language or remember it well. For one thing, our intuitions about how functions are expressed are unreliable, i.e. what we imagine we might say to express doubt or disagreement (for example) is often not what we actually do say, or what our students themselves would want to say. One of the reasons is that the appropriate choice of language depends on context, situation, roles and relationships, intention and feeling, which can only be appreciated -and only learnt well - in a whole and developing context.
Finally, drama provides not only interactive language input, but also a stimulus for activities which exercise interactive language output (Advice, Gossip, Lipreading and mindreading, Missing scene,
Soap write-out, Scenario, Telephone conversations, What's next?). The virtue of such activities is that they are constrained in language terms by the context, but are also highly creative and enjoyable.
However, we should realize that watching drama that you don't understand is a very negative experience. You yourself may recall sitting out a foreign-language film to the bitter end after getting lost in the first half hour. If people are to learn through drama, they must understand it. And the fact is that, as normally viewed, most film drama is too difficult for most language students. Students need to have at least lower-intermediate level before they can cope with a full-length feature film without subtitles, and at this level it would still need to be a simple film.
The next question we face is what makes films easy or difficult. What hinders comprehension is:
• high verbal density, i.e. a lot of speech with very little action (e.g. Woody Allen films);
• words which don't match the action, e.g. in smart dinner-table conversation; or words which are in conflict with the action or are an ironic commentary on it, as in send-ups and satires like Indiana Jones or Monty Python;
• a high degree of naturalism in the speech, e.g. everyone talking at once, mumbled asides, actors with their backs to the camera, inconsequential dialogue;
• cartoons - mouths, faces and body language are not as expressive as those of real people;
• dialect and regional accents - local colour in the film generally means local confusion in the viewer, and many excellent soap operas are inaccessible to language learners as a result;
• period language, e.g. Shakespeare remains difficult in spite of some wonderful adaptations; howe
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