Film Archive

ROUNDTABLE: Film in the Language/Culture Curriculum Mark Kaiser - BLC Associate Director EmeritusMaya Sidhu - Continuing Lecturer, French Department Speakers:Ambika Athreya (German), Myrna Douzjian (Armenian), Nathalie Khankan (Arabic), David Kyeu (Swahili), Natalya Nielsen (Swedish), Oksana Willis (Russian) Led by Mark Kaiser (BLC Associate Director Emeritus) and Maya Sidhu (Continuing Lecturer, French Department), the six speakers…

Film in the Language / Culture Curriculum Introduction by Mark Kaiser Amir Effat (Spanish), Cristina Farronato (Italian), Nataliia Goshylyk (Ukrainian), Nora Melnikova (Hindi), Giuliana Perco (Italian), Karen Llagas (Filipino), Minsook Kim (Korean) Led by Mark Kaiser, BLC Associate Director Emeritus, this past summer the seven speakers listed designed a lesson plan for classroom use based…

This paper discusses activities designed for students in an Introductory Czech class.  The film-generated assignments presented here, based on selections from the Czech film Kolja made available to students as clips from the BLC Library of Foreign Language Film Clips via bCourses, address not only a range of specific language skills (listening, speaking, writing, and even…

For the intermediate student of Russian, there is no topic more daunting than motion verbs. Verbs that denote motion further complicate the language’s aspect system (already difficult to master), and for non-native speakers, these verbs express surprisingly precise ideas. This project and paper aim to improve upon static, pictorial models of motion that textbooks offer…

We are excited to let users of the LFLFC know about several exciting developments: First, we have moved from Adobe Flash to HTML5 as our platform for delivering video, which means that users may now watch video clips on mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones. Second, we are now partnering with the Media Resources…

This past summer we added more than 100 films to the LFLFC, as well as approximately 1000 clips, primarily in Swahili, Armenian, Korean. This brings the total number of films in the LFLFC to 1715 and the number of clips to 16,757. Many thanks to the taggers who worked so hard to make these clips…

The purpose of this project was to develop pedagogical material for a film module on historical memory in Intermediate Spanish, as part of a larger departmental goal of increasing the presence and effectiveness of cinematic resources in our literacy-based curriculum. This presentation will describe the development, piloting, and evaluation of a unit on historical memory…

This study, conducted in a 300-level college French class with15 students, builds on previous research on symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2009, 2011). Using a film scene and a “Semiotic Gap Activity,” we examine how students construct meaning. What do students prioritize? What do they bring from their past symbolic representations? Are they aware of their own perspectives? What do they gain from the activity? Students were divided ...

Pragmatics is an underrepresented area in L2 instruction, in spite of disciplinary emphasis on communicative skills (de Pablos-Ortega, 2011; Eisenchlas, 2011). Films have been shown to be capable of mitigating this lack of pedagogically prepared materials (Abrams, 2014; Kambara, 2011; Fernández-Guerra, 2008; Grant & Starks, 2001; Washburn, 2001), and may provide scaffolding for teaching pragmatics as a dynamic, context-dependent phenomenon. In line with current research in pragmatics ...

This paper suggests new ways filmic texts might be employed in advanced foreign language classes. Typically, film has been seen as source material for broadening students’ vocabulary or for developing communicative competence. This paper considers what a close reading of a filmic text ...