Film scenes and role-playing: Potentials and empirical findings on the use of audio-visual texts in foreign language teaching

Abstract

Role-plays are a popular task format in foreign language teaching, among other things to promote speaking. Teachers often assume that their learners have already acquired ideas about the scene to be portrayed or that they can draw on knowledge from their first language. However, this is not always the case. To successfully perform a role-play and thus an interaction, learners need knowledge about the underlying generic characteristics, such as the structure or the verbal, but also non-verbal design of the scene. Referring to a process model for learning social interaction situations (Hallet, 2015), this paper argues for the use of film scenes to model different kinds of interactions and prepare learners for role-playing activities. After a presentation of the theoretical framework, selected results from a design-based research study, which focussed on promoting speaking in two Year 6 English classes (a total of 52 learners aged 11-12 on a pre-mediate level) via a synthesis of genre- and drama-based approach, are presented.