I have never been a huge fan of using music during class. When it comes to singing songs, they’re great with little pre-school students but with older students, all they’re doing is repeating and memorizing words. There’s no creativity involved.
Despite saying that, music is perfect for listening activities: students can either listen to a song whilst listening for keywords or, try to write down as many words as they can understand. For higher-level students, they can even have to try to figure out the story that is being told in the song.
Music can also be a great way to focus on syntax by giving students pieces of paper with the lyrics on them and students must listen to the song and put the lyrics in the correct order.
Film, on the other hand, is my favourite use of media in class – so much can be done using film and with so many ages.
Even with your pre-school students, films can be a useful tool for eliciting vocab and sentences. To give an example: once I was teaching my 3-year-olds the following vocab: cars, road, toys, toy shop, person, people, sky, clouds and the sun.
So I threw on Toy Story 2. There is a scene where the toys try to cross the road in order to get to the toy shop on the other side, meanwhile they unknowingly creating chaos on the road. This is a perfect clip to show to the students as it has every word I needed to teach. Every second or so I would pause the clip and get a student to tell me what they can see.
Movie clips are also great for eliciting descriptions and getting students to give a descriptive speech. In a different higher level class, I was teaching animals and the focus was to get students to be able to describe the animals. So I threw on the opening scene of ‘The Lion King’.
Before the film started I got one of the students to the front of the class and told the class this student was a panda. They all laughed and I asked the students how we can describe a panda. The whiteboard looked something like this:
A Panda
It has (colour) (type of skin): It has black and white fur
It has (number) (body parts): It has four legs
It is (size): It is big
It is (adjective): It is lazy
It eats: It eats bamboo
It can (verb): It can sleep all day
Then I played the clip of Lion King and once again I would pause every other second or so when a new animal would appear on screen and get a student to describe that animal using the description template on the whiteboard.
Films can also be a great way to practice grammar. Let’s say I’m teaching the present continuous (pronoun + to be verb + verb ing). What activity could I do to teach this grammar that also incorporates using a film? How about this game:
Storyboard
Present the class with a short storyboard consisting of 6 – 10 pictures. They can be still shots from a film, cartoon, comic book etc. Then set the class the challenge of eliciting the story from those pictures by writing a sentence or two about each picture.
Let me explain in more detail how I would exactly execute this game:
Firstly, I will find a film with an interesting 2-3 minute clip and then print screen 6 – 10 frames from that clip. Choose the perfect screenshots that best describe the clip and paste them onto a PowerPoint presentation or into a word doc.
Once, when I was teaching present continuous, I used a clip from Christopher Reeve´s Superman film where Louis Lane falls from a helicopter that is stuck on the top of a skyscraper and superman makes his first public appearance by flying to Louise Lane’s rescue:
As each picture is presented to the class, the students must write a sentence or two about what is happening in the picture using the grammar that is being taught i.e.
The helicopter is on fire, it is leaning over the building.
The italic section shows where the student has included the present continuous tense in their sentence.
After each picture frame, the students each read their sentences and the student with the most interesting sentence gets a point.
For higher levels, films can be used as the center point for an entire class. The aim of using films in class is to focus on listening, comprehension and storytelling.
One must first find a good clip with plenty of dialogue that is also appropriate to the students’ English capabilities. Below is a step by step guide of how to use film to accomplish these above goals:
- Watch the clip yourself at home and jot down any vocab that your students will not know.
- At the beginning of the class before you show the clip of the film, elicit and introduce the words you think the students won’t know.
- The first time you play the clip from the movie, turn the monitor off and play the clip so that only the sound is present. Students jot down as many words/sentences as they can hear. Mind map on the whiteboard all the words/sentences the students heard.
- Afterwards, turn the monitor on and play the clip without Students meanwhile jot down any words or sentences they can hear excluding the words/sentences already mind-mapped on the whiteboard. At the end of the clip, add any new words or sentences the students have heard, to the whiteboard.
- Next, either as a class or in pairs, create a story chart.
- Once finished with the story chart, play the clip again but, add English subtitles this time. Hopefully, the students will now have a complete grasp of what is happening in the clip. Go through the story chart and see how accurate they were.
- Questions – In teams, students write up to five questions for each other team about the clip. They then swap questions and answer each other’s questions. The first team to answer all the questions correctly wins.
- Storytelling – Students create a new story as to what they think might happens next.
- (optional) If time, give students a comprehension worksheet relating to the clip. Whilst you may find some worksheets online for the movie you are showing, it’s always better to write your own worksheet for your students, as only you know your students’ ability and can therefore adjust the questions appropriately.
- As homework, ask the students to watch the entire film at home (there are so many websites that can buffer movies or even download them). Next class, you can start with a discussion about what they thought about the film.
