Doina Morari,

Access Program
Assistant

Using Film in
the EFL
Classroom

How can film help you

teach English?
Learning from films is motivating and
enjoyable
Film provides authentic and varied language
Film gives a visual context
Variety and flexibility
Exposes the students to spoken language
Useful in teaching vocabulary
It contextualizes language through the flow
of images, making it more accessible
Film also offers an enlargement of our
knowledge of the world and the cultures that
it contains.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/blog/how-can-film-help-you-teach-or-le
arn-english

How to Use Films in

Teaching?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ExwaPaHSdM

How to Use Films in

Teaching?
1. Find something you like
2. Choose something you can understand
70-90% of (without subtitles or other help)
3. Dont use subtitles in your own language
4. Watch several times
5. Start with English subtitles, then watch
again without subtitles.
6. You dont have to spend a lot of time- ten
minutes a day is better than nothing.

Activities

Jeopardy

https://jeopardylabs.com/play/ultimate-harry-potter-jeopardy
Create your own: https://jeopardylabs.com/

Story prompts
Make up cards with words from a movie that your
students had to watch. During the lesson, invite a
student to come in front of the classroom. His task is to
come up with a story using the words from the cards he
extracts one by one. Another variant of this activity is to
make up a story together with all the students. One by
one, the students extract a card, and have to make up a
sentence with the word each has got. They also have to
be attentive to the previous sentences since they are
supposed to create a coherent story.

Voice the Characters

Vision On/Sound Off (Silent
Viewing)
Invite the students to watch an episode from a move
without sound. Their task is to voice the characters
and to suggest what they are saying in that particular
episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTQiVvGZTA

Character
s
Agne
s

Gru

Marg
o

Minio
n

Edith

The Clothespin Game

This game is very good for checking how attentive the students were
while watching the movie. Invite a student in front of the classroom.
Put some clothespins on him. The class has to ask their colleague
film-related questions. If he answers one correctly, he has the right to
take a clothespin off. If not, he will give answers to more questions
until he will give enough correct answers to get rid of all the pins.
The task of the whole class is to keep the person who is in front of
the classroom there as long as possible.

Role Play
Great scenes
Episodes that were not included
in the final script (the students
come up with those scenes)
Favorite scenes
Come up with other conflict
solutions
Imagine that the characters lived
in a different epoch. How would
they react to the situations they
find themselves then?
Come up with another ending

Character Interview
Students role play a press
conference in which reporters
interview characters from a film

Dear Film Friend

The students write a letter
to a character in a film.

Famous Film Lines

Students match famous lines of film dialogue with
the names of the actors who said them.

http://www.filmsite.org/topquotes.html