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[Roger]

[Roger]

Reply No. 2 to Glenski,

you quoted several excerpts from my post, then concluded that, although Japanese and Chinese students have much in common (by which, I suppose, you mean their rote-learning approach to acquiring English, their culturally-induced lack of self-confidence and, finally, their communitarian learning style in class), you cannot imagine my approach to be workable. I challenge you here: why NOT???

I found that Chinese do respond if you move the goalposts a little bit. You have convinced me that pair work can be implemented in classrooms, and I have done it with my students, but I am not satisfied with the results.
I deem it my duty to define objectives and results. One of the objectives I set is for my students to take a more mature, rational and topic-centred outlook and ignore the audience. Let me tell you I was at least as inhibited as my students are in making speeches to my classmates when I was a student; I can see, however, that Chinese can overcome their so-called "shyness" under a number of circumstances.
First of all, you must remove from them the impression that they are going to have to talk about something in which their academic knowledge matters. My gut feeling is that those Expressway/Headway whatever the name of their textbook might be mislead them potentially into memorising parts of the texts, which they regurgitate as their contributions to a discussion. It doesn't often occur to me that they are actually making up their own opinions; rather they are trying to square any new input with old notions on the same topic.
I choose topics that they hardly find in their textbooks. Well, most topics are in them, but I modify their discussion topics to make their speeches as personal as possible. And let me say, I do succeed reasonably well. I posted some time ago a response in which I explained that my students - in several different classes - enthusiastically addressed the topic of cheating in exams. I narrowed the topic down to "how do you cheat, or how did you cheat at some time in the past?" and let them discuss it in small groups before one of them had to give a presentation; the onus was removed froim them because no one had to actually "own up" as the presentations were the result of team discussions.
I didn't allow all the students to dwell on the same aspect of cheating; I asked half of the class to tell their classmates what the schools ought to do in order to stem this trend. I got equally enthusiastic cooperation on this topic.
Either Japanese are even more wanting in self-confidence, or there is an aspect we both might be overlooking...

[Glenski]

editing this post to a PM.

[ChinaMovieMagic]

Movies can be a good source...
...if there's no DVD access, use an audio cassette player w/tapes of the soundtrack and the script downloaded from www.script-o-rama.com

Check out this article, for useful exercises etc.

http://www3.educ.sfu.ca/conferences/ierg2004/uploads/31.doc


2nd International Conference on Imagination and Education
Vancouver, Canada

July 14 - 17, 2004

Listening, Viewing and Imagination:
Movies in EFL Classes

Kusumarasdyati

Faculty of Education
Monash University
Australia

Correspondence related to this paper should be addressed to:

Kusumarasdyati
Box 84, Building 6
Faculty of Education
Monash University
Clayton 3800
Australia
Email: [email protected]

Listening, Viewing and Imagination:
Movies in EFL Classes
=========================================

Introduction

Interest in oral and aural language skills has gathered momentum in the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) since audio-lingual method, which highlighted such linguistic production and perception, reached the peak of popularity in the 1960�s. In the subsequent years, language educators have continuously dedicated increasing amount of time spent on listening and speaking in the classrooms. It is important to note that learners listen to the foreign language they are studying approximately twice as much as they speak it (van Duzer, 1997; Nunan, 1998); consequently, the role of listening in EFL learning can hardly be downplayed because the acquisition of this receptive skill becomes a vital prerequisite of good speaking ability. To promote the learners� mastery of listening skills, teachers need to carefully select and prepare a variety of quality teaching materials and aids to be used in a language laboratory, ensuring that the learners will gain optimum results from the listening lessons. A relatively simple (but frequently overlooked) way to achieve this is selecting commercial videos containing movies as teaching aids and then developing materials based on them.

Films in video format should not be regarded as merely a peripheral �extra� in a listening class; on the contrary, they can function as the core content and become an integral part of the curriculum (Sommer, 2001). Appropriate, creative exploitation of movie videos can reveal their potentials in fostering the acquisition of listening skills (Eken, 2003); therefore, their use as instructional media in listening lessons should be encouraged due to at least four pedagogical values. Movies provide exposures to the real language uttered in authentic settings and the culture in which the foreign language is spoken (Stempleski, 1992; Telatnik and Kruse, 1982). In addition, they assist the learners� comprehension by enabling the learners to listen to exchanges and see such visual supports as facial expressions and gestures simultaneously (Allan, 1985; Sheerin, 1982), which may boost their insights into the topic of the conversations. Another benefit relates to motivation: films about issues that draw the learners� interest can positively affect their motivation to learn (Stempleski, 1992; Allan, 1985; Lonergan, 1984).

The present paper, therefore, aims to suggest a technique of presenting movies in EFL listening classes, which is based on years of successful application in a number of tertiary institutions in Indonesia. Such a technique not only allows undergraduate students to listen to authentic spoken language and at the same time view the accompanying paralinguistic information and sample the culture depicted there, but also encourage them to be more imaginative learners in constructing meaning from the verbal and visual inputs.

Prior to proceeding to a detailed account of this teaching technique, it is essential to establish a framework by reviewing two key notions: listening comprehension and imaginative education. This paper, consequently, consists of three parts. In the first part I address the basic concepts of listening comprehension in the teaching of English as a foreign language. This is followed by an explication of imagination as it relates to education. The final part is dedicated to the elaboration of the teaching technique that takes both into consideration.