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Dead Poets’ Society: the boring Latin teacher. My Big Fat Greek Wedding: the intrepid, in-love guy who tells the whole world that he has three testicles. Saturday Night Live: Alec Baldwin sing-songs his French lessons and then gets stomped by real Frenchmen. The Pink Panther: Inspector Clouseau tries to get a “rheum”. The popular media are filled with examples of how everyone has an image of what it is like to teach and learn a foreign language. Teachers of language and literature can learn from these snippets of popular culture much about how their constituents (dissatisfied former students, anxious future learners) view language teaching and learning. We can also use these resources to help our learners, and to teach language teachers. The presentation will cycle through a large collection of clips, old and new, sad and heartening: Professor Unrat forcing his ESL students to recite Hamlet while holding a pencil in their teeth to improve their “th” pronunciation; Isadora Duncan telling her Russian teacher to switch from “The pen is rrred” to “You have beautiful thighs”, after which the teacher has to do ESL with Isadora’s Russian lover (“We make love like tigers”); the “History Boys” practicing (or failing to practice) the French subjunctive and conditional in a make-believe brothel; the Killer Bimbos with their shtick about huevos; Robin Williams and pal discussing Hemingway “every fucking day”; and - best of all - Bambi illustrating good learner behaviors, and his fellows good teacher behaviors, as “birr” turns into “birDD” and Flower gets his name, with a little grammar lesson about adjective placement (“pretty flower”). But seriously, folks. Students come into our language classrooms with preconceptions that we must engage and, often, correct, so that they can learn better. So do teacher candidates. If we understand our learners, the media clips can help us help them. While the clips run in the background, the presenter will discuss in-the-trenches experiences and provide support materials: worksheets that help learners use the clips to understand their preconceptions and learn more about learning, and, for faculty who train teachers, modules that correlate the clips with various methodologies of language teaching. Conference attendees who are not language learners or teachers are invited to stop by for a wry chuckle and to talk with a sympathetic listener about how they had X years of language Y and never learned to ask where the bathroom was. That’s all, folks. |