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A Clip from Sabrina for French Teachers
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16 thoughts on “A Clip from Sabrina for French Teachers”
Merci, Sabrina!! This could work for any langugage–we just showed it to my friend’s (traditional) Latin class after I cracked up watching it in my corner! I have a new plan for tomorrow!!
Love that French video! Great stuff! Kristy Placido turned me on to commercials, and I use them a ton in my classroom, along with sorted other videos. Monday, I tied in a song (What Makes you Beautiful) and a “Just for Laughs” video with the core vocab structures; it was a huge hit! They asked to do it again last night. LOL Just for Laughs clips are great for Movie Talk because they generally have no dialogue/narration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwJfXgTO7J4
Their favorite commercial thus far is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWkZ_StRjU0
Hi Carol,
Hahaha!! I loved that commercial. But we couldn’t show that one to high school kids, could we? Plus the message might be morally reprehensible or politically incorrect to some people. So regardless of where we stand, probably better not open Pandora’s box…..
I’m planning to try Movie Talking to the animated film The Snowman – which is 25 mins long and available in 3 parts on Youtube. The class is 2 reluctant 10 year olds and a 7 year old – thais in Bangkok… it is the hottest part of the year now. So we will see.
It’s a cute film without words. But I think would be considered infantile by your teen students.
Part i – 9min40 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuO4fWQBb7c
part 2 – 9min 30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsXt5JSYEQI
part 3 – 8 min 07 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE78XSQKMxI
By the way… I am learning Spanish and I really enjoyed this short film – 38 mins – on youtube. It’s set in Caracas and is called el pasajero. I found it gripping and the characters interesting… Could it be useful for intermediate learners?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WetL4QY_Q
Thanks for these Kath! Actually I think that the Snowman would be great..many will have seen it as children and that is a great place to tap into. Also…depending on the relationship we have with our students, nothing is too juvenile. :o)
with love,
Laurie
If anyone would like a power point of screen shots for the video Sabrina shared above (iPad vs. Paper commercial), feel free to email me and I’ll send the presentation I just made.
gregoryastout@gmail.com
I will share with you all (just copy and paste URL and add an “h” – often when I try to include links I get a security message or my post gets delayed).
ttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1EajK__C8PDdj1sE4zdT6mLRdVq__U_XlnSDARSkVqiY/edit?usp=sharing
This should save you all some time, especially if you teach Spanish. I’ve created only-text readings and screenshot picture readings of 20+ MovieTalks and I’ve separated them into targeted and non-targeted categories. My wife, native-Spanish speaker, edits my texts.
I’m not sure it’s possible to download these and edit if you don’t teach Spanish or want to edit the captions.
I am going to print these out and add to my classroom library. These are the kinds of books our students will enjoy reading and benefit from, even more so than TPRS Readers, since the picture-text match will make these more comprehensible for beginners. We need graded readers for beginning FL students!!! . . . maybe my summer project.
Not sure how legal it is to create these screenshot books, so it’s all free, and please don’t share these with everyone. The link to these MovieTalk materials and many more are available on my website – scroll down to “Reading” (add an “h”)
ttp://www.edgartownschool.org/class200.html
Thanks for sharing these Eric! Your target structures from “iPad vs. Paper” are much more useful than the ones I had considered for my classes today (Collaboration pays off once again!). I just looked through your picture reading for “iPad vs. paper” and I like the idea of describing the scenes from the viewpoint of the dad -and how doing so allows the use of first-person forms. How do you use your readings and picture readings in class? Specifically, how do you use your reading and picture reading for “iPad vs. Paper”? Do you use both the reading and picture reading only after doing Movie Talk with screenshots or do you just start off right away with the reading and picture reading?
Check out the newest edition of IJFLT. You’ll recognize one of the author’s from the “Teacher to Teacher” section 🙂 I think that there you will find the answer to your question.
To start the article, it mentions moretprs and I had also included brief info and a link to Ben’s listserv, but for whatever reason, that didn’t make it into the final version 🙁
Great article, Eric! I read through most of it. A solidly academic work, indeed. You are becoming a true authority in our world. Bravo! You’re inspiring me to follow your lead. And Karen Rowen made a good decision to publish it.
Indeed, Eric -your article is answering my questions…thanks!
For anyone looking for a clear “how to” on Movie Talk, here is the link for Eric’s article from the IJFLT, June, 2014:
http://www.tprstories.com/images/ijflt/jan2014-articles/IJFLT-January-2014.pdf
Today I finally started to feel like I’m getting a handle on Movie Talk. I feel the key for me to engaging my students (in what admittedly can easily turn into a dry, Q and A session) is proving to be the complexity of my questions according to Bloom’s taxonomy. (Now that I’m writing this, I think I actually read this in an explanation of Movie Talk somewhere, but I didn’t get it till this morning in class).
I discovered this in my 2nd period this morning. I started class right away with screenshots of the “iPad vs. Paper” commercial, sitting at a computer at the front of the room and typing into a text box on each screen shot the sentences that my students and I came up with together. After only about 5 minutes of this, I saw a few eyes glazing over and even one head going down.
This quickly-dying energy made me worry. But, my main take away from Eric’s article when I read it last night was that Movie Talk is not a bells and whistles-type of activity. It’s simply a way to make input a little more engaging and comprehensible by way of images -images which also help us stay “in bounds” with our vocabulary. So, as I remembered my take away this morning in class, I had the idea to try throwing more complex questions at the kids (and to not comment on their apparent lack of interest).
Instead of asking “What’s happening here” or “What is the father doing?”, I started asking questions that require inferring and I explicitly asked for their personal opinions. By the end of the class, not everyone was offering comments (which I am OK with -those who want to output do output, those who don’t want to eventually might, but still get input regardless), but everyone was making eye contact with me and following the “conversation” we were having about each screenshot. It was great! So, I’m finding that student focus during Movie Talk is increased by engaging the kids’ brains through questions which require higher-order thinking skills. This is likely old news for the Movie Talk gurus out there. But it was a great lesson for me this morning as I practiced my execution of Movie Talk -and I was pleasantly surprised that the level of focus in the room went up without me even referring to eye contact, sitting up, etc. (The only overt behavior correction I made was for the kid with his head down, who was a great sport and sat up, with a smile, when I announced to the class in French “Uh, oh, we’ve lost Rishi”).
Here is an example thread of increasingly complex questions I asked this morning for one of my screenshots along with some of the great answers my kids suggested:
Me: Is the father happy with the mother?
Students: No.
Me: Why isn’t the father happy?
Ss: Because the mother is using paper.
Me: So, the father doesn’t like that the mother uses paper?
Ss: No.
Me: Why doesn’t the father like that the mother uses paper?
One Student: Because it’s traditional.
Me, changing directions: Does the wife prefer paper or technology?
Ss: Paper
Me: Yes, she prefers paper. But why does she prefer paper?
Ss: …no response…
Me: Why do you think she prefers paper books and paper post-its to technology?
One Student: She thinks the iPad is not good for one’s health.
Me: You think that the wife thinks the iPad is not good for one’s health?
One Student: Yes
Me: Do YOU think using a lot of technology is not good for one’s health?
One Student: Yes.
Me: Why do you think using a lot of technology is not good for one’s health?
One Student: It’s not good for the eyes.
After this, we all chatted for a minute about how using an iPad can be tiring for the eyes.
During all of the above, I was typing my students’ comments into text boxes on each screenshot and reading out loud as I typed after students had made comments. My kids seemed to enjoy seeing their comments pop up on the screen right as they said them, sometimes exactly what they said, or my paraphrase of their comments.
In another class I had already typed my kids’ comments onto each screenshot yesterday during class. These comments were in the third person, just describing each scene. Today, we went back through all of the screen shots and narrated the entire video again using first person as if we were inside the mind of the father, with me once again typing my kids’ comments as I asked them questions about what the father was thinking. I’m happy to be adding Movie Talk to my repertoire!
…I think I actually read this in an explanation of Movie Talk somewhere, but I didn’t get it till this morning in class….
Dude. That is the best! You didn’t get it until you did it. That’s it. That’s how we learn this stuff. We do it.
P.S. I got the idea of narrating the above video from father’s point of view from Eric Herman’s Movie Talk section of his website, which he provided the link for a few posts above.
Cool, Greg!!!
Your example is reminiscent of Blaine Ray’s “Go-back-in-time and explain” (not really called that, what does he call this technique?). He spins entire sub-stories by getting details from students to explain things going on in the current story. He’s wearing a black shirt. Where did he get it? How did he get the shirt? etc. In this way, you can personalize/customize the MT! Great idea!
Keep experimenting with MT! There are likely many undiscovered applications! I just included the main things that I’d learned from my experiences.
Eric said:
…[Blaine] spins entire sub-stories by getting details from students to explain things going on in the current story. He’s wearing a black shirt. Where did he get it? How did he get the shirt? etc. In this way, you can personalize/customize the MT!…
This is a detail of great importance. We want to find as many ways to park on details as we can, as Eric explains. We ask questions that tie the story/MT/image, etc. to the students or to a back story. The questions we can ask are endless. It is all about gathering fun and interesting information from the students*.
We must keep our clumps of questions in bounds, however. This is a very common mistake we make. Yes, learning a language is a random process, but the process must be kept in bounds because we don’t have the time that we do in our first language to get thousands and thousands of reps. So because of the time factor we must make sure that we target certain expressions and include that target in whatever we say, in every sentence without fail until it loses energy and then we go and target something else in our “random” questioning.
In Eric’s example, if we start talking about a shirt, we say “shirt” in every single sentence until it fades out naturally (not the shirt, the questioning). Obviously, these advanced techniques cannot be done too much in beginning level classes, as we first need to carefully build a foundational vocabulary (again, we do this in a natural way and without tying out instruction to thematic units or lists) so that we can spin our advanced questions wider later, in an ever expanding whirlwind of vocabulary that keeps adding more words into its vortex over time.
*as per this quote from Blaine, a major “ah-hah!” moment for me when I was still trying to wrap my mind around the basics of TPRS:
…I believe people who are the most effective at TPRS don’t tell stories. They ask questions, pause, and listen for cute answers from the students. The magic is in the interaction between the student and teacher. TPRS is searching for something interesting to talk about. That is done by questioning. Interesting comprehensible input is the goal of every class. If we are there to tell a story, we will probably not make the class interesting. We will be so focused on getting the story out that we won’t let the input from the kids happen….