Incorporating Culture into Listening Comprehension Through Presentation of Movies

Abstract

The use of movie videos as an instructional aid in the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) should be encouraged due to various pedagogical benefits. This article attempts to suggest a technique of utilizing movies in English listening classes in order to improve the aural perception skills of the learners. It comprises three stages:previewing, viewing, and postviewing. In the previewing stage, learners read a bried description of the theme of the movies to activate their prior knowledge, guess the meaning of certain keywords presented in sentential contexts, or familiarize-either with or without any subtitles-and while doing so they are supposed to answer several questions in written form. Finally, the learners are enganged into a postviewing activity in the form of contrasting cultures reflected in the movies. This technique of teaching listening has proved to be effective in developing listening skills in a foreign language and sentizing them to the target culture, which is an inseparable aspect of language learning.