Chris offers us below what in my view is a very good description of some of the salient features of what a MT/YTD class should look like. Chris I took out what you said about the no dialogue weakness in MT since you agreed with Jim in a later comment in this thread that we could just make diaologue up:
WE TEACHERS call the shots re: what gets said, how long it takes, how much we circle, etc. It seems to me an art: like a story, it has to move fast enough to be interesting, and slow enough for us to get reps on our targets.
My criteria for a Movietalk session:
— the video should be about 3 min max and have a fairly “obvious” (i.e. non-ambiguous storyline). In my view, best is to picturetalk a few screenshots, then show the whole thing, then talk about one final, climactic screenshot.
— my MAIN focus will be whatever structures we are working on. My SECONDARY focus will be on recycling whatever the kids know that’s in the film. If we are working on, say, “falls down” and “his/her ____ hurts” from our most recent story, we circle those the most. But if something easy to talk about comes up, something we know — e.g. “goes” or “wants” or the colours ___ and ___, we BRIEFLY talk about that.
— EVERYTHING we say has to be comprehensible and we do NOT introduce new vocab in Movietalk– it is more of a “review” thing. The kids should have already recognition-acquired ( as opposed to output-acquired) the “newer” structures.
— one could do a feature — 10 min/class over 5 months — but it would take a lot of planning because you would have to suss out all potential vocabulary beforehand or be really quick on your feet.
[ed. note: I hope I didn’t offend anyone by writing YTD in the title above. I just wanted us to see what it looked like written down. It’s from James. My opinion is that we do need to change the name in some way away from MovieTalk, since MT is not what we do. But maybe we should keep it. Who knows? Or like Eric says who cares as long as it’s CI?