Teaching with Film Clips

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Teaching with Film Clips
Subtitles are only the most visible and
charged markers of the way in which films engage,
in direct and oblique fashion, pressing matters
of difference, otherness, and translation. -
Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour

• Mark Kaiser
• Associate Director
• Berkeley Language Center

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Outline

• General observations on film clips
• Integrating clips into the curriculum of a
  current 1st-year textbook
• Going outside the textbook framework

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CLIPS Criteria for Selection, 1

• Pedagogical goals
• Modeling language, culture
• Developing skills (listening comprehension -gt
  speaking)
• Developing transcultural awareness

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CLIPS Criteria for Selection, 2

• Length
• Decontextualization vs loss of focus
• Determined by film or by pedagogical goal?
• Impact of subtitles
• Genre
• Quality of acting
• Language difficulty

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Nachalo, Chapter 7

• Grammar
• Aspect, Tense
• Reported speech
• Prepositional case of pronouns
• Lexico-grammatical
• Time expressions
• Verbs of learning/studying
• Expressing thanks
• Lexical
• Seasons, times of day
• Telephone
• Foods/cooking
• Invitations
• ??????, ????? ?????? et al
• Cultural
• Pushkin/Evgenii Onegin
• Personal letter

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Nachalo, Chapter 7

• Grammar
• Aspect, Tense
• Reported speech
• Prepositional case of pronouns
• Lexico-grammatical
• Time expressions
• Verbs of learning/studying
• Expressing thanks
• Lexical
• Seasons, times of day
• Telephone
• Foods/cooking
• Invitations
• ??????, ????? ?????? et al
• Cultural
• Pushkin/Evgenii Onegin
• Personal letter

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Topic Telephone in Nachalo
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Sample Dialog

• - Hello.
• - Good afternoon. Tell me, please, is Nina at
  home?
• - She isnt here. Shes at the university.
• - Do you happen to know when shell be home?
• - Please call this evening.
• - OK, thank you. Good bye.

• ????, ? ??????.
• ?????? ????. ???????, ??????????, ???? ?????
• ?? ???. ??? ? ????????????.
• ?? ?? ??????, ????? ??? ????? ?????
• ?????????, ??????????, ???????.
• ??????, ???????. ?? ????????.

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Telephone - 1

• Goal modeling telephone vocabulary
• Find clips with telephone vocabulary
• Search on specific vocabulary
• Search on telephone
• Goal developing listening comprehension
• Create exercises based on clips
• Cloze exercise (see handout)
• Questions with annotation tool
• Create in-language subtitles
• Have students act out scenes

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Telephone - 2

• Developing cultural awareness and translingual
  competence
• On topic
• Telephone etiquette when to call, whom to call,
  where to call
• Create English subtitles how to translate ???
  ????????? ...
• Off topic anything that comes up in the clip
• Recall the clip Arrested calling in a favor,
  rank in the police, different attitudes in the
  jail cell to a womans drinking and smoking
• Akvarium 2.12.85.06

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Letter

• Letter from the Caucasus
• Yura meets with Shura
• On postal indexes
• A photograph turns up

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Pushkin / Evgenii Onegin

• Text of Tatyanas letter to Onegin
• Biographical material
• Video clips
• Scenes from Tchaikovskys opera (if we had them)
• Other possibilities
• On the Bicentenary of Pushkin
• Quoting Pushkin
• Pushkin
• Quitting a job

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Other Uses of Clips

• Accents play clips with regional dialects
• Decisions have students speculate on what
  happened before and after a clip
• Detective have students determine place, time,
  genre, mood, etc., based on cultural clues within
  the clip
• Retelling of a scene from different points of
  view
• Comparing scenes from written texts to screen
  adaptation

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A TL/TC Approach

• Students are educated to function as informed
  and capable interlocutors
• Students are trained to reflect on the world and
  themselves through the lens of another language
  and culture.
• Students learn to comprehend speakers of the
  target language as members of foreign societies
  and to grasp themselves as Americans

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Final thought

• The LFLFC is a work in progress. It is, even for
  languages such as French and Russian, with more
  than 1000 clips each, an imperfect tool for
  searching and finding clips. Your input via
  comments will improve the database and make this
  a much more robust tool as we add more clips in
  more languages.