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A Quickstep to the Movies
This page outlines a quickie lesson plan for writing a movie review or
getting students ready to see any recent movie with a critical eye.
Target audience: high intermediate-advanced ESOL learners
What you need:
Internet with a 56 Kbps minimum connection and any of the free
online video players, such as RealOne,
Windows
Media Player, or QuickTime,
all of which
are free and downloadable.
What to do:
1. Have your students
preview of some of the
vocabulary used in movie reviews: Go to Randall's ESL Cyber
Listening Lab
and select >Movie Review in
the right-hand column (Difficult in the General Listening Quizzes
category; you might use the Basic Listening Quiz about Movies in the
Medium category first). Students
listen to
the conversation about a movie while filling in the blanks on some
questions. (See below Resources
for Movies Online for more listening practice with movie's at
Randall's site.)
2. Go to Yahoo Movies to check
out the >Critics Reviews
of the selected movie (put the movie name in the >Search Movies box). You might want
to select one Critics Review on the high
side and one on the low side for your students to read. Also decide if
the language/vocabulary of the reviews is appropriate for your
students. All of the reviews link to a trailer of the movie.
3. Have your students read at least one review and watch the trailer
(see Resources for Movies Online
below). You might put your students in groups to each read
one of these reviews, report back, and discuss the differences they
found. Have them copy the substance of their
feedback to an MS Word or e-mail document to send to you or have them
make a blog entry their electronic portfolio of this set of activities.
3. You may also be able to find an Alan Silverman review with related
video or audio shows (and podcast capability) at Voice of America News.
(Search for his name, and then select >Refine Search, where you can choose
>Exact Match for a
particular date range.) Though Silverman does
not write for lower level students, his reviews include the names
of the major characters, a plot synopsis, and some of the background of
the film, so it is good for more advanced readers and writers. Students
can listen to a podcast of the show as
they read.
4. Your students have by now collected enough information to write a
good review, or to see the movie with at least some idea of what they
will
be looking at. Below is a simple format to use for a review. Please
feel free to copy this format and revise as you wish.
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A quick format:
Name of the Movie
Reviewed by _________
Plot synopsis: [Summarize what happens in one-two paragraphs, but try
not to give away the ending]
What was the best actor/actress/scene?
Did you enjoy this movie? Why or why not?
Your rating [could be A-F, 0-2 thumbs up, etc.] and why:
[even if you
didn't like the movie it might be very well done and others might like
it.]
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Follow-up:
Students might
- Read the book the movie was based on
- Write a script for a scene that was "left out" of the
movie
- Act out the script for the new scene
- Act out a scene from the movie but in a different
time or culture
- Create a multimedia presentation about the movie and
its significance
- Watch the movie together (over several classes if
needed), and discuss it using the reviews that they read
- Etc. (don't forget the popcorn)
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RESOURCES FOR MOVIES ONLINE
iTunes Movie Trailers
Has links to trailers at the major movie sites, without lesson plans.
Internet Moving
Image Archive
Contains over 3,000 feature length films out of copyright, usually in B
& W and running around an hour, as well as Open Source Movies, TV
shows, news programs, ads, etc.
Film. com
Has dozens of short videos
ranging from hit movie trailers and pop music concerts to top stories
in the news.
Listening
Dicttion at English Online France
Glenda Hanson's English On-Line site has a several trailers with
accompanying exercises in grammar and vocabulary. Select >Listening exercises >Movie Trailers Dictions.
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Last updated 15
December 2009; copyright
Elizabeth
Hanson-Smith (with many thanks to Aiden Yeh for suggesting many parts
of this lesson plan in an e-mail 2 October 2002)
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