As forward-thinking professionals in our continual search for additional resources, approaches, techniques, and methods to expand our repertoire of English language teaching tools, we often don’t need to look beyond our immediate surroundings for inspiration. A commonly available resource for authentic English is movies. Are the films practical for teaching the English language? How do you do it? What are good films for teaching English? Where can you get it? Why bother using movies? These questions, and others, will be explored briefly in this series of articles. Here are five good reasons why you should use popular movies with your students for English language acquisition and practice.
1. Movies in English are really enjoyed
A wide variety of types of students enjoy watching movies. It is a resource from which you can draw considerable mileage on a wide range of topics and subjects.
2. Movies in English are readily available
Unless you live in Tibet or Borneo, English movies are usually available from a variety of sources. Rental stores, bookstores, theaters, media, record stores, and music stores have numerous titles available at all times. Offers change or are updated as new movies are released.
3. There are different movie formats available.
Whether your available viewing equipment is VHS or BETA, NTSC or PAL, 35mm, 16mm, or even 8mm video, you can still find a wide variety of movies to choose from.
4. The duration of the display is controllable.
How long are your English class sessions? Fifty minutes? One hour? Ninety minutes? Two hours or more? Regardless of the length of the classes you have, the movies can be tailored to fit the time frame you have available. How? Just use movie clips or “installments” instead of the entire movie in one shot. Actually, this seems to work much better for many teachers and class groups.
5. The use of subtitles and subtitles is controllable.
Another useful aid for watching movies is the ability to enable or disable features such as English subtitles or student L1, or the use of subtitles in movies, documentaries, or videos produced with this feature. The use of subtitles in English not only supports listening comprehension, but also helps in the development of vocabulary and reading comprehension. As English language learners’ skills develop, these aids may be turned off.
As forward-thinking professionals in our ongoing search for additional resources, approaches, techniques and methods to expand our repertoire of English language teaching tools, films can provide us with a dynamic and easily accessible resource to enrich and expand our English language teaching. These reasons contain just a few of the many benefits that we and our students can experience. In the companion to this article titled “5 Ways to Use Popular Movies for English Language Teaching,” we’ll look at the ways that English movies, clips, and videos can be leveraged in the ESL classroom.
