On The Application Of Film Clips To Junior English Teaching

With the rapid development of society and economy, talents good at English are badly needed in our country. So English has become more and more important. In current English teaching, teachers as the dictatorial governors of the class are just trying to provide students with answers and information just like filling empty vessels. With such a backward teaching mode, students find English learning hard and boring. Current English teaching is greatly challenged. Something has to be done.As an at-hand resource in our everyday life, film carries information by sound and images, which can enrich the background knowledge of the students, offer them information as well as enhance their capacity of understanding. Film materials can provide rich visual aids to input, and at the same time expose students to large quantities of input. The input can become more comprehensible through the support of visual images and various subtitles, though the film language will be a little beyond students' current level. Events, setting, actions, expressions, gestures in a scene give students a dense immediate context which highlights meaning, both literal and pragmatic.Studies from both home and abroad have been carried out for a long time, but they're mostly about the application of films to audio-video course in colleges and universities. So far no study has been carried out on the application in Junior English teaching (JET). In this paper the author made a study of exploring a more effective way of teaching English in Junior High School with the aid of film clips. The paper aims to answer the following three questions: 1) Is the application of film clips practicable in JET? 2) Is the application of film clips to JET superior to current English teaching without film clips? 3) What are the advantages of applying film clips to JET?This experiment lasted two semesters from Sept 1, 2007 to July 9, 2008, which covered 180 teaching periods. The subjects for this study were 104 Junior Two students and 25 English teachers from Xi'nan No.2 Middle School in Sanshui District, Foshan City, GuangDong Province. The experiment examined students' improvement and performance from the following four aspects: 1) motivation; 2) language acquisition; 3) vocabulary; 4) cultural awareness. The instrumental tools involved in this study were three questionnaires and two tests.The result of the study concludes that the application of film clips to JET is clearly superior to current English teaching without film clips and that with film clips used in English teaching, the efficiency of teaching and learning will be greatly raised.In this paper, we tried to explore a more efficient way of teaching bydemonstrating the feasibility and advantages of applying film clips to JET. Our attempt in this study is just a beginning. It is hoped that our research will be of some practical use to our junior English teaching and learning, and will provide references for those who are also interested in this subject.