Movie Clip Activities
http://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thc0408/CCDBF/movies/index.html

Francis Britto, Sophia University

The Web page at http://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thc0408/CCDBF/movies/index.html shows no title, author, or any instructions. It's so simple and drab that first-time visitors might wonder what it's all about. In fact, it took me some investigating to discover that it was constructed by Hiroaki Sato hiroaki@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp, an associate professor at Senshu University, to help learners of English improve their listening skills and pick up idiomatic constructions from movie clips.

When you enter this page, which loads quickly since it has no frames or graphics, you get 35 hyperlinked phrases, some written in English and some in Japanese. These links are grouped under five categories: Movie Demo (6), Pronunciation (1), Grammar (13), Usage (11), and Love (4). You may select any of the 35 phrases listed under these categories. For example, if you select the first item under Movie Demo, entitled Whiskey and woman, you'll get a new page with a short fill-in-the-blank question (see Figure 1 below). Also, immediately a 12-second-long clip from the classic movie The Third Man is loaded, and you can watch this clip and hear the dialog. The movie appears within a rectangle of about 7x5 cms on a 17" monitor. It's moderately visible (depending on the lighting used in the segment), but the sound quality is excellent. Though perhaps not intentionally inserted, the movie clip also shows Japanese subtitles! After listening to the dialog carefully—you may replay movie clip any number of times—you have to answer the question by selecting one of the radio buttons associated with the four choices. As soon as you input the answer, you get a popping JavaScript message box, which tells you whether the answer is correct or not. The message box offers no explanatory comment whatsoever.

Each of the thirty-five entries follows essentially the same pattern: showing a short movie clip, posing a fill-in-the-blank question, and evaluating the answer you give. The content of each question too is very similar, concerning just one small word or phrase uttered in the movie and requiring the correct identification of the word from about four choices.

Although I haven't used this site in my class—due mainly to the fact that our computer classrooms are currently unsuitable for running sound-producing software—I'd highly recommend it to Japanese EFL learners of the intermediate level (e.g., high school and university students) who are interested in improving their listening skills. The chief merits of this site are the following:

(1) Each exercise is based on moving images, making the chore of doing exercises interesting to learners. It is quite rare to find a free educational site that offers so many movie/video clips as the present one.

(2) Each exercise focuses on just one or two English words. The learner has to concentrate only on the missing word and try to identify it from the available choices. As a listening task, this seems to be challenging and at the same time manageable. Students can feel a sense of accomplishment after completing each task.

(3) Besides by guessing the missing word, learners can improve their listening skills by following the transcribed dialog. Since instant replay, as well as the English transcript, is available, they can listen repeatedly until they can decipher the spoken utterances without the aid of the transcript.

(4) Although the primary purpose of this site is to help learners improve their listening skills, it also offers a variety of idiomatic and grammatical expressions, which learners can observe as they are used in context. For example, students can learn how to make offers, how to say good-byes, how and when to use subjunctives, conditionals, rhetorical questions, and so on. In fact, Sato seems to have selected the clips primarily as examples of such grammatical and idiomatic constructions. If used in class, the teacher can elaborate on the formation and usefulness of these constructions.

I used Netscape 3.0, on a Pentium 100 (48 MB RAM) Windows 95 computer with a LAN ethernet connection, to access the site. Although the sound quality was perfect, the screen often looked rather dark, making it difficult to identify the characters and objects appearing in the clip. The clips are of various lengths. Many are smaller than 1,000 KB, taking less than 25 seconds to load and playing for about 15 seconds, but some are about 2500 KB, taking about 150 seconds to load and playing for about 30 seconds. Of course, the loading time will vary depending on network congestion, the type of network connection, and the specs of the computer. Regardless of the time it takes to load for the first time, once loaded, a clip can be replayed instantly. Your computer has to be equipped with the QuickTime Movie Player plug-in, which you can download for free (see http://www.apple.com/quicktime, or http://home.netscape.com/plugins/audio-video.html).

Clearly, this site is rather limited in scope. It seems to be an experimental construction (though Sato wrote to me in private correspondence that it won't be pulled down in the near future), done with a view to demonstrating the use of movie clips for learning English. Naturally, the items presented are somewhat random, and the activities expected of students are very brief: answering just one question per clip. However, given that there's no other comparable site and that it's adequate for helping students improve their listening skills, it's likely to be appreciated by EFL teachers and students.

Sato seems to be involved in several software development projects, including some that use movies. If you're competent in Japanese, you can visit the following pages, where he presents some of his ideas and programs: http://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thc0408/llworkshop/llworkshopd.html, http://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thc0408/ccF/cc.html, and http://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thc0408/llworkshopNew/reblinRonbun.html.

If you like the site I've presented or are interested in using movie clips for teaching or learning English, you may also find the page http://www.senshu-u.ac.jp/~thc0408/jugyoF/seminarHP.html , developed by 12 of Sato's students, worth a visit. On this page, each student presents one or two clips taken from The Third Man or The Little Princess, together with the English transcript, Japanese translation, and annotations on some words and phrases.

Francis Britto, Ph.D. is the author of "Web Pages for English Learners," a new column in the Daily Yomiuri.