Film Circles
Scaffolding Speaking
for EFL Students
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What is a Film Circle activity?
A
Film Circle is a structured group project
where five students are
assigned different
roles to perform according to their abilities
and
interests.A worksheet about the
movie
The Circle, discussing sense of community
and the way people are
seeing the online
world and participating.
Each student in the group has to analyze a
film from a
different perspective and present
conclusions. Every role is designed
around
specific activities that are completed before,
while, and after
watching a film.
The
process is scaffolded—at every stage
the activities include contextual
support to
build on background knowledge and make
understanding easier,
including the use of
worksheets with graphic organizers, visual
representations, word banks, and sentence
starters. Without this
scaffolding, the project
would not have been possible.
For example,
before the film students learn
relevant vocabulary and discuss a preview
of what they are going to see. While watching
the film, students practice basic listening and
reading skills.
After viewing the film, group members engage
in cooperative learning as they share with
each other the information related to their role
assignments; this exchange
ensures that
each student contributes to the discussion
and practices speaking.
Example:
We chose the movie Goal! The Dream Begins
(Cannon 2006).
This is the story
of a Mexican boy who lives
illegally in the United States. His dream is to be
a professional football player, but he suffers
from asthma. He is given the chance to play for
Newcastle United, where, after facing many
challenges, he succeeds.
This film worked perfectly for our students
because the majority of them are football fans,
and the message of
perseverance is inspiring
for young people. Assigning five student roles
for a Film Circle.
1. The Designer:
The student with the Designer role summarizes
the entire film through
graphic representation
of the main scenes. This role uses visual
intelligence, sequential thinking, and oral
summarizing skills.
The task
is to create pictures that illustrate a
timeline of the plot and
contain corresponding
sentences about what was happening at each
point in the film.
The Designer is given a worksheet with a
timeline and blank
boxes for the pictures that
have labels such as “Santiago tries out for
Newcastle United.” A word bank is also
included for language support,
with connecting
words like next, then, and after this.
We created this
role for our Film Circle to give
students who learn visually a chance to
work
with pictures and to reinforce the other
students’ understanding
of the plot during the
discussion.
2. The Soundtrack Analyzer:
In
the role of the Soundtrack Analyzer, the
student uses a worksheet to
take notes about
the bands, songs, and styles of music from the
film to
promote group discussion.
Thus,
this
role matches the emotions shown in
scenes from the film with music played at those
specific moments and shares that information
with the
group.
The worksheet used by the Soundtrack
Analyzer includes a graphic organizer
containing certain scenes juxtaposed against
a word bank
describing emotions and musical
styles, along with sentence starters about
music to help take notes.
The
Vocabulary Enricher role is taken from
Fink’s (2011) lesson plan, and
the task is to
classify key words from the film and share
them with members of the group.
As an adaptation for lower-level students, we
used
a handout with circles representing
various themes from the film, and
the student
had to discover words related to each theme.
For example, if
the concept on the handout is
football, the student might write the
words
player, sports agent, and football. The English
subtitle function
helps the Vocabulary Enricher
to both listen and see new words, which
helps
the student complete the worksheet.
The new vocabulary is shared
with the group
members, who benefit from learning new
vocabulary in context.
4. The Questioner:
Director, which we call the
Questioner, a role
that directs the student to create questions for
members of the group.
The Questioner asks questions to get
information and promote group discussion
about the film. As an adaptation for
lower-level students,
we gave the Questioner a graphic organizer
showing
different parts of the film and a list of
topics to help form
questions, as well as a
guide to create basic questions and start a
conversation, such as the sentence starters “I
think ________” and “It seemed that ________.”
5. The Checker:
As
the name indicates, the Checker evaluates the
contributions of each
group member. We found
this role to be very important in our context
since
students need structure and accountability in
order to work in
groups without direct teacher
supervision.
On a worksheet, the Checker
completes specific
information about how the group worked and
notes the
strengths and weaknesses of each
member’s participation in the group discussion.
The Checker uses a worksheet to check the
accuracy of other group members’ observations,
including a graphic organizer and sentence
starters related to the film’s main ideas.
The Checker is responsible
for participating in
group discussions to get sufficient speaking
practice, and he or she also has to use notes
and the worksheet to give oral feedback to
group members. This role promotes peer
checking and autonomous learning.
Pre-viewing activity:
As a preparation activity, we studied the
textbook vocabulary and
activities related to
sports; this preparation helped the students
understand the film better when they
watched it.
Students were also pre-taught\ vocabulary
from the film through pictures and examples,
and they were told that specific words would
be useful during the project. A cloze activity
was useful to pre teach the vocabulary:
Students were given a script of the movie trailer
where several deleted words were replaced by
blank lines. As they watched the trailer, the
students had
to read and listen in order to fill in
the missing words.
This listening
activity helps prepare them to
understand the film when they watch it
and
gives them written support for some of the
concepts they will
encounter in the film. Since
the students are at a low level of proficiency,
this extra support is necessary to make the
language they will hear comprehensible.
Viewing activity:
In the second class, the students watch the film
with English subtitles,
which were used to
support students’ listening with a written
representation of the words. While watching,
each student fulfills his or her assigned role and
pays attention to the language and the concepts
of the film.
Students will be watching and listening for
different
information that will be shared later
during group work. Although we did
not expect
our students to understand every word of the
film, we did
expect them to understand the plot,
the major scenes, the order of
events, the
characters, and the emotions associated with
each event.
This expectation was communicated explicitly
so that students did not
waste valuable class
time trying to understand every detail. This
approach resulted in added practice in the
important skills of reading
and listening for
main ideas.
Post-viewing activity:
In the third and last class the students worked
in their groups, taking
turns to present the
information they gathered and participate
in a discussion of the film they had seen.
The discussion was very basic,
often with
students asking and answering simple
questions or reading their observations
out loud.
As our students progress, we hope to make
the activity appropriate for a more advanced
level by taking out some of
the supports and
encouraging students to use more creativity
in their
roles to express ideas and opinions,
and to enrich the overall discussion.
Teaching Forum 2006, Volum 44,
Number 2
