Subtitles are only the most visible and charged

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 1 st-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? • • Impact of subtitles Genre Quality of acting Language difficulty

Nachalo, Chapter 7 • Grammar – Aspect, Tense – Reported speech – Prepositional case of pronouns • Lexico-grammatical – Time expressions – Verbs of learning/studying – Expressing thanks • Lexical – – – • Seasons, times of day Telephone Foods/cooking Invitations правда, между прочим et al Cultural – Pushkin/Evgenii Onegin – Personal letter

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 • • 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 • • “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: • • “On the Bicentenary of Pushkin” “Quoting 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.