Lights, Camera, Action: Film as an Interdisciplinary Teaching Tool in English-language Lessons

Abstract

[eng] Nowadays, teachers and other experts in education are constantly looking for new techniques or methodologies that help to change how we used to see education in the past. They intend to re-invent new ways to go through the teaching task in order to make it as effective and motivating as possible, for both students and teachers. The use of film in the classroom is not something new, since many teachers have been using them for a long time. However, its possibilities as a teaching tool have not been fully exploited yet. This article aims at exploring the opportunities that film can offer to the world of education and to boost a wider use of it in educational contexts. This will be done by defining what film really is with all its implications, explaining why it is a rich instrument worth using and how to use it with students paying special attention to interdisciplinary teaching. The focus in this last issue is how to link language and culture, history, literature and occasionally philosophy by using film material in the English language class. Finally, specific audiovisual texts have been selected to provide some good examples of films from a didactic perspective. Results show how teachers can make a wider use of films and how all the subjects mentioned above can be integrated in one single material.