I have changed the way I do Movie Talk. Below you will find the old instructions:
Movie Talk is a technique that CI beginners often cling to because it is fairly easy to keep students engaged while the teacher is perfecting their CI skills. If this sounds like you, feel good about Movie Talk! It was originally designed as a technique for true beginners who did not share a common language, and it is a very powerful way to develop listening comprehension. I also appreciate that Movie Talk leads teachers to speak naturally, describing the plot of the video while leaning on high-frequency verbs such as the Sweet 16 in order to remain comprehensible. If you plan on using a TV series or movie as an ongoing anchor text, I recommend that you first spend at least several weeks practicing with short videos as described here to not only improve your own skills but also to train your students what to expect when watching videos in language class.
- First I present a no-prep, 55 minute lesson based on a 45 second wordless video.
- Second, I present a Movie Talk lesson with a prepared reading.
- Third, I provide a list of about 50 videos that I approve for Movie Talks. You can explore this technique without having to spend hours scouring YouTube for videos.
I like both ways of doing Movie Talk, with prepared readings or without. Prepared readings help the teacher retain a tighter control over the class and gives the illusion of rigor for students who need a worksheet to value the work done in class. If you have trouble with classroom management (every teacher will face difficult classes at some point in their career), a prepared reading to go along with the Movie Talk is an excellent solution. My prepared lessons are in Spanish, but for other languages you can do any movie talk in any language and then save the Write & Discuss generated in class for the following year.
I would do these lessons as described in any level class, assuming that the complexity of language will differ according to the students that are in the class. I can bring up AP themes as they occur to me in a level 1 class, as long as I can keep it comprehensible, but I am more likely to stick to concrete description. Likewise, in my AP class I will lead students to delve deeper and make observations that move beyond surface level comments, but we will also include concrete descriptions.
The basic skills used in a Picture Talk will prepare you to do Movie Talk. I recommend that you start the school year with Picture Talks using student photos from their childhood (see the “Student Voices” module), your own photos (no beach photos!), and some photos that elicit a story such as the illustration of the child thief that I discuss in the Picture Talk essay from this module.
The following lesson template can be used in its entirety to fill a 55 minute class, or you can cut corners and squeeze this into one of the 15-20 minute blocks that I use to plan my lessons. Feel free to print this small lesson template and tape it to the wall at the front of the room so that you can remember the sequence without having to consult your notes in the middle of class.
(1) Talking through the video
First I show them just one frame of the video, as if we were going to do a Picture Talk. Looking at the frame to the left, I ask them ¿Qué ven ustedes en la foto? (What do you all see in the photo?) and we spend a few minutes commenting on everything we can think of, including asking if the man is happy or sad and guessing what might be in the photo. My all-time favorite student response was: es una foto de una hamburguesa y el hombre está muy triste porque comió la hamburguesa. Then we watch the first few seconds of the video; click here to view the entire video on youtube .
The first time through I stop it as often as possible, simply describing what we see. I stand in front of the classroom at the screen and tap on the screen whenever I want my student, sitting at my computer, to press pause or play. Simply standing up front is very important to keep my students focused and engaged; when I am in back behind my computer they tend to be less engaged.
I rarely write anything on the board the first time through (unless a student explicitly asks); I want them to hear the language first. While teaching I am looking at the list of sweet sixteen verbs posted on the wall, so it is easy for me to improvise, drawing from previous learned verbs. When the man in the video puts the photo on his nightstand, of course I say Pone la foto sobre la mesita de noche and then I ask artful questions around that phrase (drawing a parallel between mesita and mesa and then defining that explicitly in English to make sure everyone understood). I can also say ¿Oye un ruido? (Does he hear a noise?) ¿Quiere otra foto? (Does he want another photo?) ¿Sabe que hay algo debajo de su cama? (Does he know that there is something underneath the bed?) because these all come from past target structures. In all we spend about five minutes with me mostly narrating and asking pointed questions to verify student comprehension.
(2) Paired retells
Do you have students whose language is bubbling over, demanding the opportunity to talk in class? Or do they all remain silent? If some enjoy speaking then we have the luxury to watch the video again, this time in pairs. I stop it at three places and ask them to describe, in pairs, everything they can for about 30 seconds. I spend much less time on this step than on the first step. You can skip this step, but I actually like to give students the opportunity to observe that, even though they can understand me fine, they need a little more input before they are ready to speak. Make sure it is a low-stress environment among peers; don’t correct anything you hear and quickly move on. Preserve the feeling of enchantment and laughter characteristic of the early stages of learning a language, but if there is no enchantment just move on.
(3) Personalization
This is the most enjoyable part of the lesson. I ask a student: ¿Tienes una foto en la mesita de noche al lado de tu cama? (Do you have a photo on the night table next to your bed?) ¿Es una foto de la clase de español? (Is it a photo of Spanish class?) ¿Es una foto de tu perro? (Is it a photo of your dog?) We build a word image for several students, comparing their bedrooms and using the vocabulary from the video. ¿Hay una ventana en tu dormitorio? (Is there a window in your bedroom?) ¿Te gusta abrir la ventana cuando llueve? (Do you like to open the window when it rains?) When we find something interesting we could follow it, asking artful questions until interest gradually dissipates, but normally I cut this off after about 15 minutes. If you are working this movie talk into a 20 minute block in your lesson plan, I would spend just a few minutes on the personalization part.
(4) Questions
I ask students to write nine questions about the video using all of our question words. After about five minutes I start to ask for student volunteers: they read their questions aloud and I write them on the board, corrected. It is funny. In a CI classroom they hear many questions everyday but, once they try to write their own questions, many make mistakes with word order. It is interesting to watch the recognition on their faces as I rewrite their questions and they recognize proper word order. It is common to hear kids mutter, “oh yeah, that sounds better”, which is appropriate for their level of acquisition. Once we have nine questions on the board I ask those same questions to nine other students, allowing us to reread the questions again. Altogether we spend around 12 minutes on this section.
(5) Whole class retell
I write on the board: Hay un hombre que… (there is a man that…) and then students add suggestions. It goes without saying that this and all other activities are conducted entirely in Spanish, with the exception of when I write words in Spanish with their English definitions on the board. With the class retell we are trying to fill all three whiteboards (my handwriting is fairly large) with long, complex sentences. Hay un hombre que / mira la foto / de su perro / y el hombre está triste / porque su perro está de vacaciones en México. What I like about this activity is that students add what they can but learn how easy it is to construct a more complex sentence. After 8-10 minutes we have a student-generated (but teacher corrected) summary on the board.
(6) Quick write
We just barely have enough time for a quick write, although we can just as easily extend the personalization part of the lesson. As a prompt I write on the board: Yo tengo una foto en la mesita de noche al lado de mi cama… (“I have a photo on the night table beside my bed…”) In my classes the responses have varied from goofy stories about a girl who has a family of cows to a touching one about the photo of one of my student’s recently deceased grandmother. Reading these quick writes sometimes helps me build a relationship with my students, and students feel great about their language abilities because they can see the great progress they made in one class period.
I use prepared readings along with a movie talk whenever (1) I want to expose students to specific themes or vocabulary and (2) when classes are less cooperative and are not contributing interesting details to OWIs and other creative activities.
I am not referring to choral response to Artful Questioning, which I require from my students, but rather to the kind of questions that probe deeper and lead to interesting class creations. There are good reasons that students may not choose to add interesting details, including class culture and the unique mix of personalities that make up any class. Some teachers react by trying to find crazy activities that they hope will create a lively class community, as if that were the key ingredient to getting kids communicating in the target language. I call that “the birthday party” approach to lesson planning. If you have a birthday party every day, kids will get bored with the same old birthday activities and the teacher engages in a constant search for new, more exciting ways to capture the attention of adolescents.
I suspect that the true problem is often not the class community but rather the natural phase of language acquisition where students feel shy, awkward and unsure about using the target language. These feelings are augmented by emotions of isolation, awkwardness and insecurity that all adolescents naturally feel, just going through adolescence. The “birthday party approach” addresses students’ feelings by providing a warm community of laughter… not a bad thing!
However, if the root cause of a lackluster student response in class is that students are in a natural phase of language acquisition in which they do not feel confident with the language, the only thing that will get them out of this phase into a place with more confidence is through more language acquisition. Unfortunately many “birthday party” activities are not the strongest, most efficient CI. If you react to students pulling back by watering down your class activities with group games (which provide weaker exposure to the target language), you only prolong the non-communicative phase in which students feel awkward. For that reason, I make movie talks paired with readings a significant part of my curriculum around late October through to the end of first semester of level 1 (or other levels, if needed).
My key insight here is that adolescent moodiness is not always an indication that you need to do something fun in class. Don’t let students complain and bully you into being silent as you watch the video or watching videos longer than 2-3 minutes. This is a language acquisition activity; they can watch YouTube on their own time.
When I have a prepared reading we will (1) watch the video like normal, with me narrating and asking choral response questions. Upon finishing I (2) pass out the reading but ask that all pencils & pens remain under their chairs. The first time through the entire text (3) I read slowly but without answering questions. Then (4) students can take out their pencils and ask questions, one paragraph at a time. They can take notes on specific words, but are not allowed to translate yet. Once we have gone through the entire text students then (5) translate everything in silence, no group work and no more questions for the time being. The paragraphs are written to be just slightly above their reading level so students generally can race through these translations in 10 minutes. At the end of the quiet translation period I allow (6) more questions so that everyone has a full, correct translation. I collect these for a grade, quickly scanning to make sure that the translations written above the Spanish match. Everybody should get a 100%.
This is the quietest Movie Talk that you’ll ever do! Although translation feels like an old school activity, it is surprisingly effective. This feels like rigorous work for students who need that to respect our class, but since the translation only lasts about 10-15 minutes with texts that are nearly transparent to the reader (with help), it is a good experience that ends with all students feeling success. I think that these texts are good whole class readings that teach students the stamina & reading skills they need in order to be successful with their own independent reading. Therefore I would argue that movie talks with prepared readings are an essential piece of the CI classroom. Your independent reading program will not blossom as quickly if you chose to leave them out of your routine.