Teaching and Evaluating Language and Culture Through Film

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Abstract The primary goals of this qualitative study were to analyze how short clips from foreign language films could be incorporated into the teaching of language and culture in the university classroom and then to pinpoint and evaluate the wide range of learning outcomes that such a multi-disciplinary endeavor would elicit from students. Activities and tasks were created with the pedagogical objectives of increasing language fluency (interpretive and presentational) and increasing cultural knowledge and sensitivity. Participants in the study (fifty subjects total) were recruited from intermediate and advanced Italian language courses over two academic quarters and divided into two separate groups, each using its own film clip and each exposed to different phases of related tasks. In Phase 1 for the first group, students watched a clip of film dialogue, read the accompanying transcript of the conversation, and then memorized and imitated the conversation—focusing on pronunciation, intonation, and paralinguistic elements. These students were then required in a second phase to research an area of culture related to the film clip, write a composition, and prepare an oral presentation. In the second group, students in the first phase focused instead on observing the visual cues of a film clip without the aid of either the audio or a transcript. The students were then prompted to write their own scripts to accompany the clip, making sure that both the dialogue and content were consistent with and supported by the scene depicted in the film. Phase 2 for the second group was the same as for the first. Throughout these activities, the project developers sought to analyze how students learn about culture and interpret it through visual media as well as to qualify the extent of their motivation and their emotional response to culture if presented in such a learning environment. Pre- and post-surveys gave students opportunities to reflect on what they knew about specific aspects of Italian culture before the project, what they learned in the process of working with the film clips and the supplementary research project, and (more broadly) what they gained from or understood differently in approaching language and culture through this pedagogical approach.