Transcript Teaching with Film Clips

Subtitles are only the most visible and charged
markers of the way in which films engage, in direct
and oblique fashion, pressing matters of difference,
otherness, and translation.
- Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour
Teaching with Film Clips
Mark Kaiser
Associate Director
Berkeley Language Center
Outline
• General observations on film clips
• Integrating clips into the curriculum of a
current 1st-year textbook
• Going outside the textbook framework
CLIPS – Criteria for Selection, 1
• Pedagogical goals
– Modeling language, culture
– Developing skills (listening comprehension ->
speaking)
– Developing transcultural awareness
CLIPS – Criteria for Selection, 2
• Length
– Decontextualization vs loss of focus
– Determined by film or by pedagogical goal?
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Impact of subtitles
Genre
Quality of acting
Language difficulty
Nachalo, Chapter 7
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Grammar
– Aspect, Tense
– Reported speech
– Prepositional case of pronouns
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Lexico-grammatical
– Time expressions
– Verbs of learning/studying
– Expressing thanks
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Lexical
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Seasons, times of day
Telephone
Foods/cooking
Invitations
правда, между прочим et al
Cultural
– Pushkin/Evgenii Onegin
– Personal letter
Nachalo, Chapter 7
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Lexical
– Telephone
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Cultural
– Pushkin/Evgenii Onegin
Topic Telephone in Nachalo
Sample Dialog
- Hello.
- Good afternoon. Tell me,
please, is Nina at home?
- She isn’t here. She’s at the
university.
- Do you happen to know
when she’ll be home?
- Please call this evening.
- OK, thank you. Good bye.
- Алло, я слушаю.
- Добрый день. Скажите,
пожалуйста, Нина дома?
- Ее нет. Она в
университете.
- Вы не знаете, когда она
будет дома?
- Позвоните, пожалуйста,
вечером.
- Хорошо, спасибо. До
свидания.
Telephone - 1
• Goal – modeling telephone vocabulary
– Find clips with telephone vocabulary
• Search on specific vocabulary
• Search on telephone
• Goal – developing listening comprehension
– Create exercises based on clips
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Cloze exercise (see handout)
Questions with annotation tool
Create in-language subtitles
Have students act out scenes
Telephone - 2
• Developing cultural awareness and
translingual competence
– On topic:
• Telephone etiquette: when to call, whom to call, where
to call
• Create English subtitles: how to translate “вас
беспокоит ...”
– Off topic: anything that comes up in the clip
• Recall the clip “Arrested”: calling in a favor, rank in the
police, different attitudes in the jail cell to a woman’s
drinking and smoking
• Akvarium: 2.12.85.06
Letter
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“Letter from the Caucasus”
“Yura meets with Shura”
“On postal indexes”
“A photograph turns up”
Pushkin / Evgenii Onegin
• Text of Tatyana’s letter to Onegin
• Biographical material
• Video clips
– Scenes from Tchaikovsky’s opera (if we had them)
– Other possibilities:
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“On the Bicentenary of Pushkin”
“Quoting Pushkin”
“Pushkin”
“Quitting a job”
Other Uses of Clips
– Accents: play clips with regional dialects
– Decisions: have students speculate on what
happened before and after a clip
– Detective: have students determine place, time,
genre, mood, etc., based on cultural clues within
the clip
– Retelling of a scene from different points of view
– Comparing scenes from written texts to screen
adaptation
A TL/TC Approach
• “Students are educated to function as
informed and capable interlocutors…”
• “Students are trained to reflect on the world
and themselves through the lens of another
language and culture.”
• “Students learn to comprehend speakers of
the target language as members of foreign
societies and to grasp themselves as
Americans…”
Final thought
• The LFLFC is a work in progress. It is, even for
languages such as French and Russian, with
more than 1000 clips each, an imperfect tool
for searching and finding clips. Your input via
comments will improve the database and
make this a much more robust tool as we add
more clips in more languages.