"Reading" a film

Everyone agrees that films are life-savers on a Friday afternoon just before the holidays, and that there is a lot of potential in using films in the classroom.  But how much do students really learn while watching a film?  And what about weaker students?  The ones who glare and say, “I don’t understand anything”.  I’ve used films for many years to keep my students interested.  I often gave them cloze activities to do as they listened.  But as I went around the room, I realized that my weak students were unable to recognize even the simplest words.  For them the soundtrack was meaningless noise.

Last year I worked with four groups of students who were failing English in their “seconde” class in a French lycée.  Sitting in classes without understanding anything that was going on, each year they had fallen further and further behind.  Some of them reacted by becoming trouble-makers. Others simply gave up and retreated into their shells, knowing that any effort to participate would cover them in ridicule.

I began doing classic TPRS with them and I soon had a positive atmosphere with students participating enthusiastically and enjoying their classes.  They had the choice of returning to their regular class at any time and they preferred to stay with me.  As a matter of fact, I used that as the ultimate threat when some of them had to be reminded that I needed attentive students.  Then I worked on a couple of songs with them.  I wanted them to realize that with improved English they could get more enjoyment out of their favorite songs.

I was very aware that there was little chance of the experiment being continued the following year.  I could see that they were progressing but I was afraid that once they were back in a regular class they would find it difficult to keep up and would become discouraged once again.  I wanted them to become autonomous learners.  So I thought about students I had encountered who had attained a high degree of proficiency outside the school system.  And I remembered a girl whose English was so good that I assumed she had lived abroad for many years.  When I asked her, she told me that she had never traveled but she had spent the summer streaming her favorite American series.

I decided to try to teach my students to watch a film in a way that would make them autonomous.  I knew they would need a lot of help at the beginning, but I decided to trust the principle of Comprehensible Input.  If we “read” the subtitles, discussed the meaning, talked about the action, the problems and the characters, they would be hearing the same words and structures over and over again.  Even better, they would be hearing the words as they saw them written on the screen, so the input would be simultaneously written and spoken.  This was not straight TPRS, because the story was the film, but I used the techniques used to read novels by TPRS teachers.                   To be continued …..