Movie trailers

Another decent turnout today, but I was running a bit late and it was the first time that we had to make do without coffee - let's hope that doesn't happen again!! Today we had a look at some movie trailers, to see whether they can be used for language learning (there's an activity here). We watched one trailer together, for Brokeback Mountain. Students were able to say what the basic ideas of the film were without too much help, but of course the trailer leaves a lot up to the imagination. I suppose that it's a good way of practising prediction and anticipating content based on just a few clues. I wanted to show a spoof of this trailer as well but the site was down - such is life!

Later, students watched some trailers on their own and described them to each other, which was a nice way of practising listening and speaking skills. I was amazed to see the range of film trailers available on the web - everything from the 1931 (or is it 33?) version of King Kong, to the latest offerings. Students seemed to enjoy this activity.

One student pointed out that you can access trailers to all the films currently playing in Hong Kong, if you visit www.yahoo.com.hk, but the trailers have Chinese subtitles. For some students, the subtitles may be useful I suppose - one of the problems with this activity is that there are no English subtitles, so you can't listen and read - but I still think that if you're reading in one language and listening in another, then that's going to slow your progress down!