| List of Clips | last modified: |
Click on the movie poster (leftmost column) to see an enlarged version of the movie poster. Click on the movie title (column 2) for information about the movie itself from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). To preview the scene the clip will show, click on its scene poster (column 3). To see and hear the movie clip itself, click on the description (rightmost column); the clip will appear in a separate window. Links are to small-format files with full-quality sound. Should play all right with QuickTime (Mac/Windows) - link to download.
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movie poster |
movie title & info link; clip length (seconds) |
scene poster |
description & link to clip |
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This is distorted phrase-book Spanish, "helped" out by an attempt to make English words sound Spanish - which only causes more trouble: an unintentional obscenity. |
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The deskclerk has huevos, and wants everybody to know it. NOTE: Some viewers may find this clip offensive. |
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Illustrates the universal belief that when you try to learn a language you are bound to say horribly embarrassing things. |
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Students learn that accent and intonation are what matters, even if they say gibberish. |
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Bambi (1942) |
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Bambi learns to talk. His little animal friends help him with vocabulary and pronunciation. At the end of the clip he, like many a beginning learner of a language, misuses his new language in a way that is, literally, charming. In an earlier scene, Bambi learned an important Novice-Low greeting ("Good morning"), but did not himself speak it. Here he learns key vocabulary of his world by a sort of syntactic mapping. Note the gentle error correction provided by his teachers, who also know when not to correct errors. |
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Professor Unrat, the prep-school English teacher, teaches the language with a mixture of Shakespeare and a pencil in the teeth. The Professor' pedagogy, such as it is, combines several time-honored methods: 1) memorization of text passages; 2) text chosen from literary classics; 3) mechanical attention to phonetics. None of them works well, at least here. |
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Born in East LA (1987) |
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Cheech Marin, wrongly deported to Mexico and desperate to earn enough money to pay a "coyote" to smuggle him back to his native East Los Angeles, takes a job giving English and culture lessons to illegal immigrants from Asia. in Clip 1 he teaches them to say "Wass sappening?" In Clip 2 they learn how to put on the appropriate "attitude." In Clip 3, the language works, but some cultural lessons still have to be learned. Clip 1 shows a persistent teacher who switches from technique to technique until something works, and who is not afraid to behave outrageously if necessary. |
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Born in East LA (1987) |
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Clip 2 reminds us that "culture" is a word with many meanings, ranging from the smallest, often unconscious features of daily behavior, to the monuments of human thought, art, science and action. |
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Born in East LA (1987) |
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Illustrates the need to acquire communicative capability for "real-world" tasks, but phrase-book language learning, like all rote memorization, has its limitations. |
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Emigrants prepare for their new life in America by speaking only English - and at times not too well yet (though it's odd that the same couple speak much better English before their "what watch, sweetness?" blooper). A classic instance of why translation and dictionary-thumbing are a dangerous learning and communiction strategy at levels below, the the minimum, ACTFL Advanced. Compare this clip to "Pink Panther Strikes Again (Clip 3)," where the vocabulary is selected correctly because Inspector Clouseau is using a phrase book, which offers words in their appropriate context. |
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He fools his listeners with his excellent accent and intonation, while speaking gibberish. A "native" accent counts for nothing if there is real no communicative ability. |
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Mindless drill, with a "teaching assistant" who has no idea about what he so authoritatively commands the learners to attend to. |
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The drill about verb forms (conjugation) remains a favorite technique for teaching other languages, one that many students hate, some students truly love, and many love to hate (= they expect it in their language classes, and are disappointed, even angry, if they are not subjected to it). Current informed opinion regards it as a poor way to teach living languages. See the "Marty" clip for the long-term results. |
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El Norte (1983) |
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Limits of rote memorization - but how do learners make the transition from that to creation of simple sentences? In other words, when does Novice-High happen (and how)? Latter part of clip: A reasonably friendly native-speaker overwhelms a learner with input far above the Krashen "i + 1" level. Many classroom learners will tell a sympathetically listener: "Yes, the instructor was friendly and spoke only the foreign language in the classroom - and we didn't understand a word of it." |
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El Norte (1983) |
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French Camp |
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Henry V (1989) |
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French princess gets an English lesson. As often happens, it soon focuses on body parts and vulgar expressions. The princess is much amused that the English word "foot," especially if pronounced to rhyme with "boot," sounds very much like the "f" word in French. |
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Henry V (1989) |
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Roleplays: French in a brothel and a WWI hospital Caution: language & content may offend |
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British prep school boys are cramming for Oxbridge entrance exams. French teacher attempts to teach subjunctive and conditional by allowing them to do a skit set in a brothel. When the headmaster appears in the midst of the skit, it turns into a skit about a WWI military hospital. The lesson nevers gets to the subjunctive and conditional. The headmaster makes it clear that language courses are unimportant - and the learners have absorbed that message. |
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Isadora (1968) |
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Marty (1955) |
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Ernest Borgnine plays a quiet war-hero veteran who is just too nice and shy to try to get fast with women. After many disappointments, he meets the Nice Girl. Suddenly no longer shy with women, he can't stop talking. He proves how good he was as a high-school German student by reciting one of the standard abstract declensional patterns. Memorizing dehydrated declensional patterns, such as "der-die-das, des-der-des" (nominative and genitive cases of the definite article) is regarded by today's language-teaching professionals as pointless learning. Of course, to become proficient at a certain level (perhaps ACTFL Advanced-mid) it is necessary to know those words and the principles of their usage, and also to be able actually to use them. But just reciting the list accomplishes nothing in the way of proficiency. |
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Practicing English by talking about lamb chops & Ernest Hemingway |
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Russian variety show performers hope to defect on trip to America; they practice their English in advance (to buy a lamb chop, talk about Hemingway, declare their love). Berlitz-like. Note the cultural inappropriateness of the lambchop situation, and how fun is poked at learning language to talk about "serious" literature, especially that promoted by the Soviet authorities. |
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Caution: language & content may offend. |
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For all the embarrassment he graciously suffers, Ian is a great language learner - fearless, good-spirited, culturally interested. In the end he gains both his beloved and a new language. |
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Ian learns how to say "Happy Easter," then tries it out on his fiancée's father. |
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Even though the girl's father scorns his attempt, acquiring language and culture together is a good feature of learning. |
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Ian thinks he is learning how to say "Thank you," but he's being tricked! Caution: language & content may offend. |
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In the early stages of language proficiency (up to ACTFL Novice-high), most communication is accomplished through single-word vocabulary and phrases memorized as units. Grammar capability comes only somewhat later. |
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Inspector Clouseau, disguised as Doktor Schultz, uses lousy phrasebook German to say "Hello, how are you?" The question "How are you?" (Wie geht's?), learned by so many German students, is inappropriate when meeting strangers. |
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Inspector Clouseau mangles English pronunciation as he tries to get a "rheum". |
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Spanglish (2004) |
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Control freak confronts the Spanish "rr" sound |
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An angry boyfriend interrupts his beloved's large-enrollment language class, which then imitates what it hears as the two quarrel. The teaching technique is a combination of grammar drill and phrase-book or audio-lingual teaching. |
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