Movies may be employed in the classroom in a manner which both facilitates language learning and further encourages motivation. For anyone involved with language teaching there can be few more professionally demoralizing experiences than a class totally lacking in motivation; so much valuable time and energy spent on an, often fruitless, search for stimulating teaching materials.
Peace Treaty. This 'peace' involves negotiations between teachers and learners which aim to re-focus the scope of the class, which attempt to align tasks compatible with the level of the group and the needs of the curriculum.
Students will often express an interest in using movies as a medium for language learning, then proceed to sleep through any movie shown. The challenge for the teacher becomes; how to harness the original good intentions with tasks that are possible, tasks that set a clear goal and leave learners with a sense of achievement upon their completion.
· A movie is chosen which both represents the wishes of the learners and conforms to institutional constraints such as content, timing and availability.
Select a video segment that contains a series of actions or visual detail. Provide the learners with a list of target vocabulary words. Ask the learners to form pairs (or groups of three) and get one of the pair/group members to be the "watcher" while the other(s) cover their eyes and do not watch the video. Play the video once with no sound and then have the "watcher" describe to the group or partner the scene using as many vocabulary words as possible in the description. The listeners can then be called upon one by one to tell the class what they heard. After they have shared their version, the whole class sees the segment with the sound turned on. It is good to have more than one video segment ready so that the first "watcher" has a chance to be a listener.
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