How to practice English at home, through music and film
Updated: 08/02/2023
It's not hard to discover why. Learning a second language, especially English, from a young age not only allows a child to learn faster, but also has proven benefits of improved problem-solving skills, creativity and provides additional career opportunities later on in life and for these very reasons, raising a child to be bilingual or multilingual, is fundamental in today's society.
It’s extremely important to boost the child’s practice and learning both inside and outside the classroom. Continued reassurance and stimulation are key and despite it being sometimes difficult to find speaking opportunities outside of the classroom, there are many ways to support this along with the use of all four linguistic elements of English.
Receptive Skills
Listening
Music has an entire list of benefits which include enhanced memory, mood and motivation, not to mention it being a great way to learn fun and interesting vocabulary. By listening to a favourite song repeatedly, you're certain to pick up and remember new language.
If you enjoy singing along, music will not only help your child increase their lexicon, but also their pronunciation, assisting them with recognising and producing native-sounding, connected speech.
Learning tip: Try listening to music or podcasts without any visual support (no video) at first. Depending on the difficulty, you can then watch the same track with the visual to aid your comprehension and confirm your assumptions.
Reading
Thanks to technological revelations in the music and film industry, video puts sounds into written words for us to see and analyse. There are so many websites that offer subtitles in-video or via a separate transcript for music fans to delve into and understand the true meaning of a song.
Learning Tip: If you want to improve your listening, read the transcript or subtitles after you've listened twice, again, to check your comprehension and any new vocabulary that were unclear.
Try the Harry Potter audio book: https://amzn.to/2QbbJwy
As well as the use of songs, movies in English can be a wonderful way to improve writing and speaking skills.
Productive Skills
Speaking
Watching a film in English having already seen it in your native language can be essential for beginner students.
A way to practise speaking is to watch a short scene, choose one of the characters that you like and then watch the scene again without any sound. When your character's subtitles pop up on the screen, repeat them. Mimic the actor/actress exactly as they say it in the movie. Rewind and repeat several times, aiming to replicate the tone, speed and pronunciation identically.
Writing
We can produce and practice writing from speaking quite easily. There are a number of activities (including dictation, just as you used to do at school though it's a little outdated now) but one way is use a program like Word and its dictation feature which will type what you say. This is fun and tests your pronunciation as the computer does its best to understand you. Once you've finished speaking, you're able to read and check the text for errors, structure and punctuation.
Conclusion
Films are made for native English speakers and not usually created for English learners therefore allowing your children to hear exactly how it should be in real life provides added benefits than just watching a good movie. Although scenes are spoken quickly using native accents, it’s extremely beneficial through hearing and understanding pronunciation, use of idioms and colloquial expressions. Films can be watched with subtitles in your own language first to provide checking abilities and a better understanding, then depending on level and ability subtitles can be changed to English and later without any at all.
By Tania
Would you like to have an English conversation with Tania? Try a trial lesson : https://bit.ly/33hWMOQ
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