To celebrate the forthcoming publication of my new book Film in Action for DELTA Publishing in April, I’m going to share some activities from the book in a series of posts over the coming weeks. Here’s the first.
This simple activity gets students thinking and talking about the multi-facteted and multi-modal nature of film and generates a huge amount of discussion and language with minimal teacher preparation.
I suggest you use a dramatic scene which has quite a lot of tension. Here’s a scene from American Beauty which works very well with this activity. However, the activity can be used with virtually any scene which has interaction between two or more characters.
Once you have selected your scene move onto the activity as outlined below:
If you try this activity with your students, do please let me know how it goes (in the Comments box below)!
Kieran
Film in Action 
Reblogged this on Stop Complaining – Enjoy Teaching! and commented:
Free activity from Kieran Donaghy on using film in our classrooms!
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Shared this link with my ELAC teachers. They loved the activity and we can’t wait to use more material from the book! Thank you, Kieran.
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Hi Lisa,
Thanks a lot for commenting and letting me know that the teachers liked the activity; great to know.
All the best,
Kieran
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Dear Kieran, discussed the film with my students.Was a very engaging discussion. All skills were practised. Used Oxford collocations dictionary to add to the list of students’ words for three Ss and three Cs. In addition we looked up collocations for RELATIONSHIP, as students came up with the word. Then we moved on to the scene description based on the format for a scene description. Thank you for doing such a great job.
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Hi Maria,
Thanks a lot for commenting and for letting me know how tha activity went. It sounds like dyou adapted it really well 🙂
All the best,
Kieran
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