http://view.byu.edu/
www.collins.co.uk/
www.radiotimes.com/film/
Level:
Intermediate to Advanced
Objectives:
Topics:
films, reviews
Activities:
1. Do a search of the corpora web site http://view.byu.edu/ for the word film and an adjective, like this: [aj*]film. (Tip: Limit your search by specifying the number of ‘hits’ or the ‘register’, i.e. spoken, fiction, academic, etc.)
2. Select appropriate and useful sentences from your search results to create a warm-up activity, in which students will highlight the adjective and noun collocations related to film.
For example, ‘The film was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle last year.’
You don’t have to rely only on the corpora web sites. Why not include your own example sentences?
3. You can make the warm-up activity more challenging by asking students to place the collocations into categories, such as length/size, origin, age, cost/income, adjective with –ing, adjective with –ed, etc. For example, students might find the following collocations and place them in these categories:
|
length/size feature-length film short film |
origin Italian film foreign film |
cost/income low-budget film top-grossing film |
|
adjective with -ing amusing film award-winning film |
adjective with -ed light-hearted film animated film |
See if they can come up with a few of their own adjectives that they can use under these headings.
Before you begin the warm-up let students know that this activity is being used in order to practice a useful strategy for noticing groups of words that appear together frequently and which they can use later when they write a film review.
4. Next give students the text of a film review which you can get from this website www.radiotimes.com/film/ or another source. Ask them what two topics they expect to find in the text given that it’s a ‘film review’. (the language of film and the language of criticism)
5. Tell them they are going to write a film review after they use this text to locate commonly used collocations on film and criticism. Divide them into 2 groups and ask one group to locate collocations related to film and the other group to find ones related to criticism.
6. Once they are finished they should share their lists with the class and highlight them in the text.
7. Ask them to write a review of a film they have seen using some of the collocations that they have highlighted in the warm-up activity and the film review.
Disclaimer: These are ideas for websites to use in the classroom. All sites were active and working as of February 2006, but do check them beforehand. EF is not responsible for the contents on any of these websites. Websites should be quoted as any other outside reference so
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