Tina and I have noticed that many CI teachers use Movie Talk a lot. We have five reasons why we don’t use it too much:
- Technology already plays such a huge role in students’ lives today. We like the hand-built aspect of working with the student artwork.
- Students today need community and acceptance more than ever. When we work together to create characters and stories, and to learn about each other, we help students not just in language acquisition, but also in character development.
- By starting the year with more interactive CI delivery methods, we develop our CI skills more deeply than we could if we simply relied on Movie Talk all year.
- Anything used to excess will lose its excitement, and it is best, in our experience, to save a visually-exciting and super-engaging strategy such as Movie Talk for the point in the year when you will be glad to have an engaging, novel trick to pull out of your hat to re-energize the class.
- The images in Movie Talk do not come from the kids imaginations and therefore cannot stimulate them in the same way that their own characters can. This is probably the most important reason to limit Movie Talk. As mentioned, kids stare at screens all day in schools, it seems.