Some teachers feel guilty about showing their students movies, thinking: well it’s not really teaching, right?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s tempting to think that putting on a movie is simply a great excuse for the teacher to sit at the back of the room, dim the lights and fall asleep clutching the remote.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not true. Creating a lesson around a popular movie is a guaranteed way to have fun, engage your English learners<\/a> and gain some much coveted popularity.<\/p>\n Check out this post to read about 10 effective ESL movie activities you can use in your class this semester.<\/p>\n [fluentu-toc]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are countless ways in which movies can support your lesson<\/a>.<\/p>\n For example, they can be used to:<\/p>\n Movies are a brilliant way for students to hear up-to-date authentic speech <\/strong>and\u00a0be exposed to various accents<\/strong>. And because there are countless movies based on an infinite amount of things, you can use them to introduce or spark discussions<\/strong> about a certain topic, be it a historical event, a time period or the culture of a foreign country.<\/p>\n Movies can be implemented into any lesson, with the purpose of getting students to comprehend and gain meaning from free-flowing speech. Here are five great activities to check comprehension.<\/p>\n This activity is good for getting students to talk in the past tense about observation-based facts.<\/p>\n You can make this a group exercise, getting teams to write their answers together. Repeat as many times as you want!<\/p>\n Use a movie to reinforce or teach vocabulary<\/a>\u00a0with this simple activity.<\/p>\n This is a\u00a0reading<\/a>-based activity, good for building up students’ recall power.<\/p>\n Each card should contain one or two sentences of events from the movie clip. These can be as significant or insignificant as you want, depending on the length of the clip and what the focus of the lesson is.<\/p>\n Here’s another activity to test students’ powers of observation.<\/p>\n A simple and lively activity for practicing listening skills, this one works better the more repetition of words there is within the movie clip.<\/p>\n For supplementary materials<\/strong> beyond these five comprehension activities, you can find tons of worksheets for video clips<\/a> from the following two websites:<\/p>\n And if you’re ever in need of a short video<\/a>\u00a0clip\u00a0instead of a full-length movie or movie part, FluentU<\/strong><\/a> has loads of pre-selected video clips to choose from.\u00a0<\/p>\nHow Does Watching a Movie Help ESL Students?<\/h2>\n
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ESL Movie Comprehension Activities<\/h2>\n
1. How Observant Are You?<\/h3>\n
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2. Vocabulary Meaning Match<\/h3>\n
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3. Order the Events<\/h3>\n
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4. Buzz Game<\/h3>\n
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5. Choose a Word<\/h3>\n
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\n<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nCreative ESL Movie Activities<\/h2>\n