Teachers' Questions: Using Movies in Class

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Q: I've been thinking of using movies in my class. But they always seem too long and with all the complicated English they seem quite difficult. Do you have any advice? - Junior High School teacher, Japan.

Hello,

Rather than using whole movies, I always found it much more fun to use movie trailers. A couple of good points are:

* They're usually short, but action packed so can stand up to multiple viewings.
* The language is usually really simple, often stressing just one main idea and it's often by that guy with the slow deep voice which is quite easy to understand.
* It's cool English!
* It's good practice for months and dates.
* You can be totally up-to-date by using movies that aren't out yet, from www.quicktime.com . This is really big for JHS kids!

One other thing to look out for is a monthly leaflet they often have at cinemas where they choose an interesting phrase from a current movie and do a mini-English lesson about it. I can't remember the name of the leaflet, but they are written by the people who do the subtitles. It's usually something that's quite tough, but popular e.g. one I saw a while back was explaining the verb "to google"








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Be genki,

Richard



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