Audio-visual aids: movies

Movies are interesting to watch, and English is important to learn. Why don't we combine these two? Group 5 suggested using animation movie titled Cinderella to teach narrative speaking.


The students watch an excerpt of the movie and write the orientation, complication and resolution of the story in a table in the worksheet. This task is done in groups. After that, a member of each group retells the story in the short clip of the movie they have watched.

Interestingly, Group 5 not only taught the generic structure of narrative text, but also had the students explain the moral values in the story. This is in line with the agenda of the government in education: character building should be taught in addition to science and knowledge. By having the students explain the moral values, the teacher transfers knowledge as well as good characters to the students.

Videos as Audio-Visual Aids

In the last session I explained about videos as audio-visual aids. Although Beta and VHS tapes may still be available, they are not much used nowadays. Teachers prefer to use VCDs, DVDs or Blu-rays as teaching aids.

ooOoo

We have guests in the classroom: the lecturers from Aceh, Padang and Bali who will observe our classes until the end of the semester. One of them expressed interest in the use of audio-visual aids as she was doing a project related to this type of teaching aid. She asked for more resources about this, so I post some of my papers below, in case you find them useful.

Subtitled DVDs in foreign language classes

The use of movie videos to enhance cross-cultural understanding

Audio Aid: Story

Students like listening to stories. It's a good idea to combine an audio story and the teaching of grammar as the former can make the latter more interesting. So how can you do this?

Group IV chose an audio story titled "The Clever Son". To present this audio story in a grammar class, you need a transcript of the story. Some of the verbs in the transcript are omitted and replaced by blanks, resulting in a cloze test. The students can fill in the blanks while listening to the story several times.

All of the verbs which are omitted are in the past tense, so it's a good introduction for the teacher if s/he wants to explain anything about the simple past tense, such as the patterns, the usage, the examples, the regular & irregular verbs, etc.

Personally I like the story. It's touching, and has a moral value: we must respect our parents no matter what. Good choice of audio story.

Audio Aid: Monolog

Monologs have been frequently used in the teaching of listening, but actually they can be equally effective when they are used in the teaching of speaking, as proved by group IV in their presentation.

Short monologs containing introduction spoken by four people are played on the tape. For example:

My name's Phil. I'm fourteen and I live in Brighton. My favorite subjects at school are Biology and Chemistry. I don't like French. I want to be a doctor one day. I spend all my freetime playing football.

Next, the students fill in the blanks in the table below.


After they complete the table, the next task is acting as Phil, Melissa, etc. and introduce himself or herself based on the information in the table.

This is a good exercise which integrates listening, speaking and vocabulary. First, give the students a model of monologs about introduction. Then have them learn vocabulary by completing the table. Finally, ask them to introduce themselves orally.

By the way, it was Neri who acted as Jonathan last time. So from now on, we call him Jonathan.

Audio Aids: Songs

Everyone likes listening to songs, so why don't we exploit songs to teach English as a foreign language in Indonesia? Group III of my media classes demonstrated how they utilized songs as the media in teaching English.

Songs in the Teaching of Listening
Before listening, the teacher gives the students a piece of A4-sized paper with the title of the song --"If I Were You" by Hoobastank--written on the top. The students also receive some small pieces of paper, each of which contains a line from the song.

These pieces of paper have double-sided sticky tape. While listening to the song, the students try to rearrange the scrambled song lines (in the smaller pieces of paper) so that they have the full lyrics of the song (in the bigger piece of paper). The song can be played several times to enable the students to check the accuracy of the order.
You could download the paper here.

Songs in the Teaching of Grammar
Before listening, the teacher gives the students the lyrics of the song "Trouble is a Friend" by Lenka. Some of the verbs in the lyrics are omitted, and replaced by blanks, for example:

And no matter what I (4)___ him, he always (5) ___ to grow oh, oh
He (6) ___ what I see and he (7) ___ what I know oh, oh

While listening to the songs several times, the students fill in the blanks with the correct verb in the simple present tense.
(The paper of this group is not available yet.)

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I like the songs they have chosen because the lyrics are meaningful. Two thumbs up for the presenters.