English Textbook Based on English Films

Abstract

Most English curricula in Korea have been based on audiolingual and grammar-translation methods, with grammatical syllabi, and not focused on improving students’ communicative skills. According to Jambor, “The Korean education system is not conductive to communication-based learning” and he also believes that students’ hesitance to speak aloud hinders their abilities to communicate in English (as cited in Ramirez, 2013). The most significant problems of those students are the insufficient opportunities they have to use what they have learned and the limited amount of exposure they have to English. In order to address this issue, my portfolio will be focused on increasing uses of English through interactive learning with films in English. Recently the English education system in Korea welcomed a new trend in that English teachers have tried to use more English in the classroom and they are using more authentic materials to increase students’ exposure to “real” language. Defeng (1998) notes that students can learn from authentic materials, such as newspapers, magazines, English news on the radio, and English TV programs. Furthermore, according to Harmer (2007), watching films encourages students to see “language in use” and allows them to see how intonation matches facial expressions. They can learn which gestures accompany certain phrases and be exposed to various cross-cultural dimensions (p.307). It is, however, often problematic to choose appropriate authentic materials, which may not be appropriate for students’ ages, levels, or interests. The target group of this portfolio is 9-10 year old students who are in Korean public elementary schools. According to the ACTFL proficiency scale, their language level is Novice-mid. They are currently taking an after-school English program which was designed to increase the amount of exposure to authentic English through film. Students come to class three times a week and each class consists of an hour of English film based lessons. The students enjoy movie genres such as adventure, comedy, family, and friendship, and they like animal characters. They watch full films for a month and most lines from the transcripts of the films are covered in the class. The classes, however, are focused too much on shadowing and mimicking activities and lessons are simply centered around listening skills. There are no opportunities to communicate with others and there is no comprehension checking about the films’ content. Moreover, in this curriculum, they do not deal with any vocabulary activities, subtitles, or scripts. My textbook will be a listening and speaking book based on English films and it will be used in my class to overcome some weaknesses of the current program such as insufficient opportunities to interact with others. It will include 10 chapters and each Chapter will be centered around a different movie. The textbook consists of a Students Book and Teacher’s Manual with eight hours of instructions for each chapter. In addition, for this course, three or four selected short video clips from each movie will be used in class and the full DVD CDs of the movies will be used as homework. There are twelve students in the class who come to the class three times a week, for two hours each class time. They will study a chapter a week.