The Analysis of the Units Related to Movies in High School English Textbooks

Ki, wan Sung

Article

Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2009;10(1):53-76.
Published online June 30, 2009.

The Analysis of the Units Related to Movies in High School English Textbooks

Abstract

This paper looks into the types of activities and thinking skills in the units related to English movies in high school English textbooks and activity books published in 2008 based on the new Revised National Curriculum. It was found that, in the 17 textbooks, there were only two units in which movies were used as lesson contents. Then, according to the classifications of the activity and thinking types using the combined categories of Bloom (1956)'s taxonomy and Marzano et al (1982)'s thinking skills, the activities in the movie-based units were rather one-dimensional in that they mostly focused on limited sets of linguistic and lower-level cognitive skills. Therefore, more efforts should be made to incorporate English movies or other media in teaching EFL and also to develop meaningful activities and thinking skills in order to increase authentic target language(TL) and culture input for high school English learners. Accordingly, some suggestions for using more movies or media in developing diverse instructional activities for EFL learner's language and cognitive development are also discussed.

Key Words: teaching English with movies;lesson contents;materials development using movies;thinking skills