Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk-XA5pKkGE
This is a simple animated song about a man (Mr Morton) told using the past simple tense. It is generally a simple story in which numerous verbs are repeated, making it suitable for beginner level EFL students. Verb repetition provides students with the opportunity of listing these examples in the past simple tense, perhaps with the goal of later determining which base verbs they belong to.
This short video would add a nice change of pace to a grammar-based lesson. Although there are references in the song to one or two grammar terms, these should not be a hindrance to the main focus of the story and could in fact be useful to those who are actually interested in grammar.
Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk-XA5pKkGE
Click here for more on the past simple.
Disclaimer: The owner of this website does not claim ownership or control of any of the content accessed via the links on this site. Consequently the owner of this site is not responsible for any changes to or unexpected content found at these links. The owner of this website has no control over the continued availability of such content and cannot be held responsible for discontinued availability. Users of this site are expected to have read and agreed to these conditions and are especially advised to check content via links before use in the classroom.
View the website at: http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.hk/
This website contains numerous movie clips selected for their use of specific grammar points. There are also brief introductions to the movie clips, introductions to the target grammar, questions about the clip for students to answer, as well as answers to those. The list of movies and language points are at the bottom of the page, not the most obvious place. Each clip is labelled as appropriate for particular language learners. It is worth noting that teachers would need more presentation of the language than that offered on this website.
In lessons, the movie clips could either be used as starting points from which to pull out particular phrases, or used as a resource for students to listen for particular target language. As starting points teachers could ask simple questions similar to these: "What did X say in reply to Y?" or "What did X say to Y at the front door?" By isolating and focusing, students know what to listen for. Their replies could be recorded visually on the whiteboard so that the language presentation/elicitation can develop from there. The worksheets on the site could be used after students have some understanding of the target language.
There is no guarantee of accuracy even when a team of writers and editors collaborate, so I advise teachers to check for themselves before using the resources. Having said that the features I reviewed looked fine.
View the website at: http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.hk/
Disclaimer: The owner of this website does not claim ownership or control of any of the content accessed via the links on this site. Consequently the owner of this site is not responsible for any changes to or unexpected content found at these links. The owner of this website has no control over the continued availability of such content and cannot be held responsible for discontinued availability. Users of this site are expected to have read and agreed to these conditions and are especially advised to check content via links before use in the classroom.
View the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyrMhKsHHd0
This clip is taken from the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It has Brad Pitt narrating the build-up to the traffic accident that Kate Blanchet's character suffers. During the narration the series of events that finally lead to the accident are described using past continuous and most notably past perfect tenses. At the point where any alternative actions in the series are suggested which would have avoided the accident, the third conditional is used. The key word of any standard conditional being "if". In the third conditional it looks like this: (If something had (not) happened) (this alternative would (not) have happenend). The "if" is quite clearly stated in the clip but there are distractions which may make the whole conditional structure less obvious.
It is an interesting clip to consider in any lesson that deals with past tenses or the third conditional. This clip does not have subtitles but is less than 4 minutes long. Despite this and because of the complexity of language, upper intermediate EFL students may benefit from it more than students at intermediate level or below.
Relevant classroom activities could involve students being given a starting and finishing point in a series with or without any linking actions. They could then be asked to create a similar narration to that which appears in the clip. Check for logic and sentence structure.
Click here to buy the DVD The Curious Case of Benjamin Button starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
Click here to buy the Blu-ray version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
View the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyrMhKsHHd0
Disclaimer: The owner of this website does not claim ownership or control of any of the content accessed via the links on this site. Consequently the owner of this site is not responsible for any changes to or unexpected content found at these links. The owner of this website has no control over the continued availability of such content and cannot be held responsible for discontinued availability. Users of this site are expected to have read and agreed to these conditions and are especially advised to check content via links before use in the classroom.
