Why Movies Work in Language Learning
&
Should be a Key Ingredient in any Language Learning Program
by
Dr. Glen W. Probst
- Most Language teachers agree that the best way to learn a language is with a movie. Such an experience is not passive, but it is emotionally charged.
- Movie watching uses more of the senses. It puts language in full context with real people and settings that are often bigger than life itself.
- It lightens the conscious effort while the learning curve goes up.
- A movie lifts students from the burdens of traditional learning by focusing their attention on the characters and action. The students are drawn into a sense of interacting with the characters
- Movies captivate a student's attention and give him a reason for learning language.
- Movies create a positive emotional attitude, and language learning becomes fun.
- They reenergize the student, giving him a break from traditional learning and increasing his appetite to learn.
- In summary, movies give students language on a silver platter.
Why Movies are most effective in the Language Learning Process
- Movies create high interest and high stduent motivation (Dale, 1969, 391-7)
- The motion picture compels sustained attention. The movement and change in a motion picture attract the viewer and hold his attention. Most outside distractions are cut off. The film can provide an intense experience, sometimes of high emotional quality.
- The motion picture heightens reality. The "duplication" of reality that can be achieved through films with sound and color makes the motion picture an especially effective teaching tool. Paul reed, editor of Educational Screen and Audio-Visual Guide, once described certain wide-screen films a "more real than reality."
- The motion picture can bring the distant past and the present into the classroom. The film effectively supplies concrete detail that few of us are able to visualize when we read about various subjects in books.
- The motion picture builds a common denominator of experience. A certain level of reading skill is required to share the thinking and ideas of the author of a book. But even illiterates can mine rich meanings from films and discuss them with others.
- The motion picture offers a satisfying aesthetic experience.
- Movies lower the affective filter, including motivation, self-confidence, and anxiety.
- Students can learn through self-access and autonomous learning. Content is made comprehensible through the repurposing process.
- Students control their learning at their own pace, selecting topics or titles that appeal to their own interests.
- Students prefer to learn in an emotionally safe environment, where risk taking is okay and non threatening.
- Traditional language learning targets the student's IQ. Learning with Talk-a-Film appeals to the students EQ (Emotional Quotient), while targeting the IQ.
Language Goals with Interactive DVDs
- To prepare students to view a feature film without interruption, understand it, and appreciate its content.
- To enhance comprehensibility and increase students' understanding of language in full social context by using the DVD medium under computer control.
- To provide students with a wide exposure to language using a popular medium.
- To provide students with a motivational and stimulating language acquisition experience.
Additional Observations on the Effectiveness of Movies.
- The motion picture, properly conceived, is not another textbook. It is not a compendium of facts, a tightly-knit summary. . . . it is a realistic, dramatic story, with full-bodied explanatory materials. The film has a beginning and an ending.
- You can't study a film bit by bit, page by page. You take all or you take nothing. It does not lend itself to drill, repetition, or memorization. Rich understanding comes with a single viewing. A film may be re-run with profit, but you get the big idea the first time and look again chiefly for points that may have been missed.
- There is little parallel between the intelligent use of a film and the reading and reciting process that too frequently accompanies the use of textbooks. This reading and reciting are based upon a series of facts--parts of speech, dates, definitions, vocabulary, grammatical errors, . . . Emphasis is placed upon drill, review, memorization as a way to make these discrete facts stick.
- Now if you understand something, you don't need to mechanically memorize or drill on it. Too often students merely repeat words, without understanding what they mean. The high degree of forgetting which follows mere memorization is a testimony to its wastefulness. Further, to memorize is not to apply. Indeed, memorization without understanding may prevent broad application of what is learned. You cannot use with understanding what has not been learned with understanding.
- Bare facts, facts not understood, are easily forgotten. They lack the connective tissue, the detail, the human interest, the concreteness which enable a learner to tie up the idea, the word, the abstraction, or the principle with his own experience.
- The motion picture, then, can supply the concrete detail which will help ward off experiential anemia. But it can do more. The commentary and the picture make it possible to match the abstract word with the concrete image. You literally see what is being talked about.
- There is yet another fundamental difference between a textbook and a film. The textbook carefully defines and limits the responses of the students. We don't have "general" textbooks. We have textbooks in various subjects. But motion pictures, partaking as they do of many of the general aspects of life, may not be so easily classified, and if the vocabulary of the commentary has been wisely prepared, the film may be used in a wide range of grades.
- Our purposes are like the strings on which beads are placed. By relating film content to purpose we string beads of experience together in a pattern.
- But equally important as providing the right mental context for the showing of films is the provision of the right physical context. The setting, both physical and mental, will affect the nature and quality of student response.
References
Dale, Edgar, 1969, Audiovisual Methods in Teaching, 3rd Edition, New york: the Dryden Press.Dale, Edgar, 1967, Can You Give the Public What It Wants?, New York, Cowles Education Corporation.