Using Short Films in the Primary Language Classroom

Hello colleague,

I’m Kieran Donaghy, your tutor who will accompany you all the way through the course, offering help and individual assessment to each one of you.

Before we start the course, I’d like you to read the brief guide to the course below.

Why are you here?

Each of you will have your own personal and professional reasons for wanting to do this course, but from my experience of tutoring on previous editions of the course and having read your individual responses to the pre-course questionnaire, I would say that your reasons may well be among the following:

• you’d like to use short film and video more often in your classes;
• you’d like to short exploit film and video more effectively in your classes;
• you’d like to use short film and video as a way to motivate yourself as a teacher and your students as language learners.
• you’d like to learn how to get your students to create their own short films and videos.

Whatever, your reasons for doing the course, we’ll do whatever we can to adapt the course to your needs.

What are you going to learn?

You’re going to learn a lot of things but essentially you’re going to learn how to use short film and video critically and creatively inside and outside the language classroom.

What are the objectives of the course?

• to reflect on why short film and video are not an optional extra but an essential part of language education.
• to learn about multimodality and multimodal literacy.
• to discover what the skill of ‘viewing’ is and how we can help our students develop it.
• to learn how to use short films and videos effectively in the classroom to promote language acquisition, oral and written communication.
• to reflect on how short films and videos can be used to foster empathy and raise awareness of values in language education.
• to learn how short films and videos can be used outside the classroom as an inspiration for written homework and future classroom discussion and debate.
• to discover where teachers can find creative and innovative short films and videos.
• to examine student video creation within language education as part of the sixth skill of ‘visually representing’.
• to learn how to write effective and pedagogically sound ELT activities for film and video.

Who is your tutor?

Kieran Donaghy is a freelance award-winning writer, international conference speaker and trainer. He is the author of books for students and teachers of English as a foreign language. His publications include Film in Action (Delta Publishing), Writing Activities for Film (ELT Teacher2Writer) and Video, The Image in ELT (ELT Council), Language Hub (Macmillan) Multimodality in ELT (Oxford University Press). He trains teachers at his specialist teacher development institute, in Barcelona and online at The School for Training. His website Film English has won a British Council ELTons Award.  Kieran is the founder of The Image Conference and co-founder of the Visual Arts Circle. You can find out more about Kieran at his author website or you can follow him on Twitter

How are we going to work?

The course is structured in five lessons – an overview of the use of film and video in language education, the use of short films inside and outside the language classroom, the use of feature-length films both inside but primarily outside the classroom, the role of student video creation in language education and how to write film and video activities for ELT.

Each lesson will be divided into topics. Each topic will have a presentation of the key concepts and examples of the concepts in use, downloadable articles and practical materials to use with your students in the classroom.

We recommend that you read and do each week’s activities within the established time limit in order to keep up with the course, share your experiences with your colleagues, and to make the most of this learning experience. However, you will have access to the previous lessons in order to go over previous ideas and concepts, or to do an outstanding task.

As you already know, the tutor on the course is Kieran Donaghy. He will accompany you through the three weeks of the course, reading your input , and giving you the necessary feedback to help you progress. If you have any queries or doubts you can also contact him by email.