In this fun and stimulating workshop,
Anna Parisi managed to get us all involved by thinking about the thoughts of
characters in a movie. What is Dustin Hoffman really thinking when Anne
Bancroft tries to seduce him in “The Graduate”?
What are Shrek’s thoughts when he sees Fiona fighting Robin Hood in the
animated movie?
While watching selected movie scenes, learners think of the thoughts of
the characters and can then insert these as subtitles to the movie. As Anna
suggested, the timing of the subtitles may become a bit of a problem but then
she gave us the solution of using scenes which have little or no dialogue,
using advertisements or even music videos.
Anna moved on to show how the same activity needn’t be used solely with
the use of films and technology. She demonstrated that the teacher can make use
of listening texts and short stories from the coursebooks, which although may
focus on particular structures and vocabulary are nonetheless quite meaningless
to our students. The attendees at this workshop had fun coming up with ideas of
what the speakers of a short listening text were really thinking. Anna gave us
short dialogues from a coursebook, and in groups we had to think of the
thoughts behind each speaker. And we didn’t just write them down but also had
to act them out! While one of us was reading what the speaker was actually
saying, another from the group had to say the thoughts of the speaker! The end result was quite amusing!
Activities like these, as Anna explained, are valuable in the classroom,
as apart from recycling vocabulary and structures, they encourage pair/team
work, they make the learner naturally think in English,
and when acted out they naturally lead to learners paying attention to
intonation!
And that’s a lot to be gained from a fun activity!
By Anastasia Loukeri
Interviewed by our Roving Reporter: Theodora Papapanagiotou
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