Predicting future and simple future
One of the most rewarding ways of getting learners to produce language – their own, or another target language – is to create a mystery, enigma or cliff hanger in …
Course: Short Film in Language Teaching
Narrating – teaching ideas
Film is an unusual medium because it is quite ‘present’ in form – it feels as though it is happening directly before our eyes. At the same time, film stories …
Narrative and story building
In the previous two steps, we looked at how sequencing shots and filling in ellipses might encourage language production. In this step we take things a little further and discuss …
Ellipsis – teaching ideas
The principal technique used by works of art is that of withholding information. Withhold too much information, and the work is opaque, obscure or obtuse, and difficult to follow. Give …
Shots in sequence
Earlier on in the week, in Step 3.3, we looked at timelines, editing, and their relationship to tenses in language. In this step we’re going to look at how altering …
Recount – teaching idea
In this step we’d like you to complete a more extended recount task. The video above is the complete version of the one whose beginning we showed in Week 2. …
Recounting and past tenses
The written or spoken equivalent of the film flashback is the ‘recount’. This is where we recall a set of events, sometimes in a sequence. Diaries are the most common …
Flashbacks and the past tense
The flashback is a technique in film that is unique to the medium; in fact there is some speculation that the notion of the flashback in human psychology – as …
The timeline
In filmmaking, the editing process is central to ‘how meaning is made’. Editing is where we decide how to sequence our shots; how long to make them, and how we …
5 different ways in which time plays a role in film
When studying film, there is an important distinction to be made between two dimensions of ‘story time’: the time we experience as the viewers of the film (the 2 hours …
Next steps
So that concludes the Short Film in Language Teaching course. We hope that you’ve enjoyed it and have benefited from contributing to discussions and sharing best practice with your peers. …
Developing film language
Teachers who took part in the BFI’s Screening Languages project found that one of the ways of intriguing and engaging young people with a new language was to help them …
Dialogue and non-verbal communication
Throughout Week 2, we’ve been looking at how film is very useful in supporting our inferences of what characters are saying. Perhaps the most valuable cues come from people’s facial …
Dress and stereotypes
Dress is one of the signals, or codes, that filmmakers and other visual artists use to communicate ideas about people, or groups of people and the cultures that they come …
Everyday culture – interpreting dress
It’s a bit of a cliché that our clothes reveal a great deal about us – how we feel about ourselves, how we want others to see us. In film, …
