Teaching Listening Through Watching English Movie

Video is a valuable and possibly underused classroom tool. There is always the temptation to simply put a video on at the end of term and let our students watch a film without even challenging them to be actively involved.

Video as a listening tool can enhance the listening experience for our students. We very rarely hear a disembodied voice in real life but as teachers we constantly ask our students to work with recorded conversations of people they never see. This is often necessary in the limited confines of the language school and sometimes justifiable, for example, when we give students telephone practice. However, we can add a whole new dimension to aural practice in the classroom by using video. The setting, action, emotions, gestures, etc, that our students can observe in a video clip, provide an important visual stimulus for language production and practice.

There are many things we can do with these clips. Here I would like to demonstrate a wide variety of them. These lesson plans refer to specific films which have been released recently, however, they could be adapted for use with a similar scene in a different film depending on availability. In the following lessons I have tried not to concentrate too much on specific dialogue that students may not be able to pick up, this allows lower level students to be creative in the classroom using video as a stepping stone to fun and communicative activities.

The activities involve pre-viewing, while-viewing and post-viewing tasks.

Vision on/ Sound off

Students view a scene with the sound turned off. They then predict the content of the scene, write their own script and perform it while standing next to the television. After the performances students watch the scene with the sound on and decide which group was the funniest or the nearest to the original. This is a good fun exercise. In this particular emotionally charged scene from High Fidelity, three people who work in a record shop have an argument. It is very graphic with plenty of gestures to stimulate the imagination. Good for intermediate levels.

Observe and write

Students view a scene (this always works better if there is a lot happening) then write a newspaper article on what they have witnessed. This lesson is based on the fight scene from Bridget Jones’s Diary, students work for a local newspaper and have to write an article on a fight between two men over a beautiful, young girl. Pre-viewing and while-viewing tasks allow them to work on new vocabulary, while the post-viewing task gives them plenty of practice on past tenses. Good for intermediate levels.

Video dictogloss

This follows the dictogloss method of dictation and can easily be adapted to video. Students watch the scene a few times and write the main words and short phrases that a particular character says. Each group is given a character and is encouraged to listen and exchange information, this usually works better if there are two characters in the scene. Working with someone from a different group, they then write the script for the scene, incorporating both characters. As they will not have managed to write down the whole script from the listening exercises they will have to use their imagination and fill in the gaps. This gives them an excellent opportunity to work on grammar. This lesson is based on the hilarious restaurant scene from As Good As It Gets and is best suited to higher levels. The pre-viewing and while-viewing tasks give plenty of practice with food vocabulary.


Watch and observe

This is a good lesson for lower levels because students only have to focus on a minimum of spoken dialogue. Students watch a scene from a film which has lots of things that they can see and therefore write in their vocabulary books. You can teach and test your students’ vocabulary by asking a series of true/ false questions and asking them to put a series of events in order. This lesson is based on the kitchen scene from Unbreakable where David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is held at gunpoint by his son.


Video as a listening tool - pronunciation

In some listening exercises we must concentrate on specific dialogue to enable our students to learn. It is necessary to challenge them to listen when dealing with features of pronunciation. I find movies provide a good source of authentic listening material for the practice of pronunciation and I use them accordingly. This particular movie exercise deals with connected speech, in particular prominence (or sentence stress). Without going into too much detail here, English is a stressed-timed language, meaning that certain syllables in a sentence have prominence therefore create a beat, other syllables tend to be said quickly making it difficult for our students to hear. Prominence, which is the speaker’s choice, is used to convey meaning. This is exactly what I want to exploit here. The movie is Family Man and uses the scene where Jack returns home after abandoning his family on Christmas morning and has to take the resulting tongue-lashing from his wife Kate. It involves a recognition exercise which helps students hear that some parts of the sentences are prominent and they are Kate’s choice. It also has an argument role-play allowing students to practice sentence stress in context. The use of video is an advantage here as it is an emotional scene with lots of gestures, adding weight to the situation.

Teaching Listening Through Playing Song

Everyone likes songs -- you just put on a CD and press "play", don't you? All you'd then need would be a "fill-in-the-blanks" worksheet and you've got a dead-easy to prepare listening exercise... But, in fact, it's not quite as easy as all that, as CELTA course tutor at IH Ellie Keegan explains...


Choosing a suitable song
"Probably the most important thing about choosing a song to do with a class is to make sure that the lyrics are clear," Ellie says. "It can be very frustrating for learners not to understand a word." Choose a singer with a nice clear voice, like Frank Sinatra, Ellie suggests.

The recording should also be a good one: a studio album is probably going to be better than a live version, if you have a choice. A CD will also give you much better sound than a cassette, obviously.

There's also the issue of whether or not the language is a suitable level of difficulty. And the language (and the subject matter!) itself should be suitable, we might add! The suitability of the subject matter is a particularly important issue if you are teaching young learners.

It's also a question of whether your students are going to like the song. "I've found that it's difficult to find songs they like which are actually useful language-wise," says Ellie. Because what you really want is a song with some useful language in it, of course.

Ellie gave us Abba's Money Money as an example of that -- one with both an interesting lexical field and the second conditional in it. Phrasal verbs tend to be plentiful in songs, if you are working on them -- Kate Bush's Don't Give Up was the example Ellie gave us.
What do you do with a song?
Apart from just pressing "play" and doing a "fill-in-the-blanks" type exercise, what else can you do with a song?

"Well, you certainly don't want to do only that," says Ellie. "Doing a song is not just a question of pressing 'play'. It's a bit like doing any listening exercise -- in planning what you are going to do with a song you want to think about productive pre-, during- and post-listening tasks that are going to be language-rich."

"If anything," says Ellie, "the build-up to the listening is really the most important stage". The pre-listening activity, in other words. "You also want to consider whether or not you need to preteach some of the vocabulary, and how you are going to deal with it," Ellie adds.

When it comes to the "during listening" stage you could provide the lyrics but include in them either information that is wrong, which has to be corrected, or multiple-choice type answers.

If you do want to do "fill-in-the-blanks", note that you will find it a question of trial-and-error: some of the things you pick out will prove impossible for your learners to catch. Blanking out the words at the end of alternate lines, but not the words that they rhyme with, is one fun alternative.

You could also try giving them, say, 12 chunks of the song, and get them to do it (before listening) as a "jigsaw reading" exercise, which they could then confirm during listening.

Ellie has also used songs for dictionary work, and also used them as the basis for an exercise in getting her learners to teach each other vocabulary.
A song you can respond to in some way
Songs that work best are almost invariably those that produce some sort of response to the music. There is the question of whether or not your class like the song -- but you really want something a bit more than just that.

Songs with a good story line make a good choice, apart from anything else because your students can then agree (and disagree) on what happened, and perhaps why it happened (and who was to blame). Examples would include a number of Bruce Springsteen songs, Nebraska and Johnny 99, for example.

A song which requires you to actually work out what is going on is also a good choice -- because then your learners can discuss that. Ellie suggested You Don't Know My Name (Alicia Keys) as an example of that.

"A song like Coldplay's Shiver, for instance," Ellie went on to say, "gets them not only to talk but also provides an opportunity to use modals and other language of speculation: what kind of woman is she, what does she look like?"

At a high level, of course, if your lyrics are more poetic, arguing about what the writer actually meant can sometimes work well. Bob Dylan's She Belongs to Me is an example (does he like her or hate her, we might ask).
Follow-up activities
Ellie had a number of suggestions for follow-up activities for songs:

* planning a video for it
* actually making the video
* writing a letter (or a mobile phone message) from one of the characters in the song
* writing a diary entry

Having "done" a song with their classes, one of the things that the teachers in the English Department at IH Barcelona use, to round things off, is to have their learners use the Storyboard computer program to reconstruct the text.

The Function of Computer When Studying

Why is it important to know how a computer works? Easy, if you don't, it will be hard to control. Computers were never built to control us even though that is how it appears. Their creation was just another tool God gave man to use to benefit society. What can you do to learn more about computers? I have an easy answer. Just read, and use computers more. They are not that hard and with time you too can become the master over this tool.

Computers, the ones we know and love have not been around all that long. The first home personal computer was not sold until 1977. We have come a long way since then. Did you know that in 1983 there were approximately 2 million personal computers in use in the United States. However just 10 years later in 1993 the number had jumped to more than 90 million. And now in 2009 the number is estimated at over 200 million.

Computers, today are small, fast, reliable, and extremely useful. Back in 1977 that really was not the case. However, they both operated in basically the same way. They both receive data, stored data, processed data, and then output data similar the the way our own brain functions. This article deals with those 4 functions: Memory, Processing, Input, and Output.

The Internet in Learning English

There are several possible reasons for using the Internet in language teaching. One rationale is found in the belief that the linguistic nature of online communication is desirable for promoting language learning. It has been found, for example, that electronic discourse tends to be more lexically and syntactically more complex than oral discourse (Warschauer, 1996a) and features a broad range of linguistic functions beneficial for language learning (Chun, 1994; Kern, 1995; Wang, 1993). Another possible reason for using the Internet is that it creates optimal conditions for learning to write, since it provides an authentic audience for written communication (see, for example Janda, 1995). A third possible reason is that it can increase students' motivation (Warschauer, 1996c). A fourth possible reason is the belief that learning computer skills is essential to students' future success; this reason suggests that it is not only a matter of using the Internet to learn English but also of learning English to be able to function well on the Internet.

None of these reasons are more or less legitimate than any of the others. However, since there are so many ways to integrate the Internet into classroom instruction, it is important for the teacher to clarify his or her goals. If, for example, one of the teacher's goals is to teach students new computer skills, the teacher may want to choose Internet applications which will be most useful to them outside of the classroom, with activities structured so that students steadily gain mastery of more skills. If the immediate goal is to create a certain kind of linguistic environment for students, once again, the teacher should consider what types of language experiences would be beneficial and structure computer activities accordingly. If the goal is to teach writing, Internet activities should be structured so that they steadily bring about an increase in the types of writing processes and relationships essential to becoming a better writer (see, for example, seven activities by Janda in Warschauer, 1995b).