Friday 9 October 2009

Using Movie Soundtracks in the EFL ESL Classroom

Using films and movies in class is a great way to encourage students to learn more language, so if you use them a lot then this site will be handy for you.


It's called MoMupl and it searches a database of movie sound tracks to help you find all the songs and music from films. You just type in the title of the movie and then click on the results to get a full list of the music tracks from that movie


You can then just play any of the tracks you want to hear in the browser.

This is a great tool that you can combine with the work you do on movies. Music is a very strong aid to memory, so you can use the music to prompt students to remember or it can just enhance the atmosphere of your lesson.

You can use this with students in a number of ways.
  • Find the sound track for a movie your students have been studying and play different tracks, then ask if they can remember what was happening in the part of the movie when this music was playing.
  • Use sounds tracks before the students watch the movie. Play them various clips and see what they can predict about the movie from the music. Get the students to create their own movie scenario from the different tracks.
  • Get students to find a sound clip from their favourite movie and tell others about it in class.
  • Use sound tracks from movies as the back ground for story telling.
  • Give students some exerts from movie scripts (download scripts from Drew's Script-O-Rama). Get them to read 4 or 5 short dialogues then play them a short exert from a sound track and see if they can match the sound track to the movie script.
I like MoMupl because it combines couple of my passions (music and film) and even if you don't use it with your students, it's still useful for finding out who it was that wrote the music you liked in the film that you watched.

I hope you find it useful.


Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, Nik. Take a look at the open session on movies that a friend and I created. You will find a very simple guide that can help students use movies and tv shows as learning tools.

http://englishthroughflicks.blogspot.com/

All the best,

Mauricio Aldana

Nik Peachey said...

Hi Mauricio

Thanks for the link. Nice site.

Best

Nik