Film Archive

The Making of a Soap Opera to Develop Students’ Foreign Language Writing and Speaking Skills by Thomas Simpson, Northwestern University This seminar describes a third-year, quarter-long language course centered on the creation by students of a parody of an Italian television soap opera. Students are called upon to act as writers, actors, directors, videographers, and…

This presentation describes a semester-length sequence of lessons structured around closely-watched film clips for fourth-semester Spanish. Based on the implementation of these lessons this semester, and of an analogous application in Italian 4, straightforward guidelines will be presented for the design of sequences of lessons that guide students from a passive to a critical and…

In August 2012, I attended The Japan Association for Language Education & Technology (J-LET) annual conference in Kobe. I am grateful to the BLC for the generous financial travel support. At the conference I co-presented with Mark Kaiser a paper on “Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence Through Film Clips.” He introduced the BLC’s ongoing film clips…

Silent cinema represents a useful tool for foreign language instruction precisely because of its lack of verbalized dialogue. Cinematic silence can be used to demonstrate the connections between visual and verbal meaning, provide unique material for a variety of writing projects and in-class exercises, and facilitate discussion about the function of language in genre and…

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Taking three common pragmatic errors by intermediate students of Japanese as a starting point, namely, overuse of the 1st person pronoun watashi, and incorrect use of hearsay markers and sentence final particles, this paper develops a strategy for employing film clips ...

Film has become an ever more effective medium of instruction in foreign languages, including Chinese. Developing good textbooks to accompany the films is too labor-intensive to keep pace with the growing production of contemporary films, so it is useful to develop strategies for ...

In Fall 2005, widespread riots shook France. Was Paris really burning? What actually did happen in France that fall? If the “social unrest,” as it was called was symptomatic of serious social and political issues in France, it was largely misconstrued in some American media outlets ...

Teaching Chinese cultural perspectives in CFL instruction is more challenging than teaching about Chinese cultural products and behavior. It is challenging because most textbooks do not orient their approach to it, because native-Chinese-speaking teachers tend to overlook it as it is so much a part of them that ...

This paper begins by arguing that the time has come for film, and film clips in particular, to take on a more central place in the foreign language curriculum. It describes in some detail the Library of Foreign Language Film Clips ...