Recent mechanical improvement in classroom facilities allows teachers to use movies as teaching material for students studying English as a foreign language. Movies help students to understand the rules of English linguistics such as grammar and sound patterns by providing them with specific real-life utterances. Unlike general textbooks, movies also provide a wide variety of interesting English examples that appear to go against the general rules. In this paper, we first divide English examples found in movies into two types: supporting examples (SptEx) that exemplify the rules of English; and exceptional examples (ExpEx) that superficially break the rules. Then, by showing a way to utilize movies via both the SptEx and the ExpEx, this paper argues that a reciprocally-related teaching method helps teachers to deepen students’ understanding of English and even broaden their linguistic views. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this method can be applied to various fields of English linguistics such as syntax and morphology, and also to a number of English sentence types. Among others, this paper focuses on comparative and imperative sentences. In addition, several potential issues related to collecting ExpEx from movies and build up a database of examples are pointed out. |