Well, this is something from the English Raven vault - a resource and approach to integrating the Harry Potter movies into the ELT classroom from some years ago when the HP craze was really approaching astronomic heights. You might find the ideas and experiences here useful if you'd like to incorporate either the same or other movies into your classroom approach.
For a summer intensive course I was in charge of in Korea, teachers came up with the idea that we could let the students watch one of the Harry Potter movies on DVD. Unfortunately, sitting around during paid-for class time to watch a movie (one the students had already seen or could easily access and watch at home) wasn't a particularly popular notion with school administration or the all-important fee-paying parents.
Still, it seemed like such a shame not to draw on something that the students knew a lot about and were all very interested in. That's when I came up with the idea of turning a simple DVD movie viewing into a "media studies" session.
My basic goal here was to take the most recent movie in the Harry Potter franchise (at that time, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), and create an approach and set of materials that would really make the learners collaborate and pay extra close attention to what was happening, what was being said (and why), and what might be inferred. The end result would also be a very "work-driven" looking booklet that the learners could take home and show their parents (who were willing to embrace the idea of enjoyable content and activities - even movies! - so long as there was documented proof of language work involved).
The result was a series of three booklets that looked like this:
We made a schedule of 4 movie sessions (to break the lengthy movie into manageable sections that fit into the overall weekly schedule). Sessions 1 and 3 involved a booklet like the one you can see above, asking the students to work in small teams and complete the questions and gap-fills scene-by-scene as that section of the movie was being played. We put the English sub-titles on to assist the learners, but didn't slow down or repeat scenes from the movie. Learners had a chance to watch the movie again at home (if they wished) and check and improve their responses before checking the work collectively in class the next day. That was an unexpected bonus, as many parents saw their children watching a Harry Potter movie whilst beavering away at a challenging work book, and they were then more willing to embrace the idea of using movies in the classroom.
Here are the booklets for Parts 1 and 3:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Media Studies Quiz Book 1
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Media Studies Quiz Book 3
In-between these two sessions, of course, came part 2, and I did things a little differently here to mix things up a little and break the pattern of just watch and answer things. For part 2, the booklet was essentially blank, and as they watched in teams, learners had to observe and come up with their own challenging questions for fellow students. At the end of that watching session, learners exchanged books and it became a homework task to try and answer another student's quiz questions about the movie. This was a nice switch and inserted a nice productive and more independent element to the overall approach.
Here is the download example for Part 2 of the viewing process:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Media Studies Quiz Book 2
That covered parts 1-3 of the overall movie, and for the last quarter of the movie, we just let students enjoy and watch the movie without any specific tasks to do whatsoever.
That was actually interesting, because we found that the students had worked so hard and paid so much attention to the earlier parts of the movie that they really felt comfortable just watching and listening by this stage, and did seem to instinctively pay more attention to it (compared to other movie watching experiences we'd had prior to that - where students varied between zoning out or just not even really caring about the movie at all). I think the earlier attention and work had also really helped them to understand all the essential foundations of the plot and characters, so that by the end section of the movie it all made pretty natural sense to them.
From the "language uptake" perspective, we also noticed that students managed to pick up a lot of expressions and pretty advanced vocabulary, and they understood a lot more of the humour in what they were seeing and felt a connection with the characters and story. As teachers found ways to discuss the movie and bring up and reapply a lot of the vocabulary and expressions to use in follow up communication activities, the language and communication payoff was accelerated even more.
Only one real problem with making these books... You have to get the movie, and watch it scene by scene, pausing and often rewinding as you write down prompts for the students to answer. It takes a fair bit of time - but the result is something that is very effective and enjoyable for English language learners!
:-)
