Film language and Teaching

We often use movies to expose the students to spoken English, in all its varieties and contexts of interaction, or to make them think about a culture or about the themes presented. However, most of the time, we do not realize the power of film language in class in terms of communication analysis. A possibility to approach this kind of discourse is to work on the inferential process. To make inferences is to create hypothesis about the explicit and non-explicit content of an input; thus, we can think about language itself (e.g. all books means necessarily some books) and about language in use (e.g. A: Did you like those images? B: The colors used were beautiful. A must understand that B did not like the images.).

A film form also holds a range of texts expressed by language, image and sound. An English class should draw the students to the study of these kinds of discourse. The conception of image as something ready and steady has to be banished from the teaching practice. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), the Theory of Implicatures (Grice, 1975) and the Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicatures (Levinson, 2000) may help us to understand the communicative process from a cognitive perspective in a more holistic view. This theoretical background takes into account the semantic and pragmatic levels of a discourse.

To illustrate the different perspectives, we have the passage[1], “Good-bye, Sam. And never forget: you killed me first.”. This speech refers to a scene in which an unknown man (for the audience) approaches and addresses a dead woman (Sam) in a hotel room.

Working with this narrow context, in a Grician approach, we are able to suppose the speaker is being cooperative and saying something false, since Sam did not kill him (braking the maxim of quality), in order to produce an implicature by the use of a metaphor, for instance, she disappointed him. According to this model, in order to have an interpretation, the audience will operate with (i) the sentence meaning and its references; (ii) the contextual information (iii) the previous knowledge (iv) the Cooperative Principle and their Maxims and (v) the presumption that these observations are accessible to the speaker and to the audience and that they know or suppose it works in this way. Thus, to observe the Cooperative Principle is to consider a mutual direction and purpose in the course of communication.

Following the Relevance Theory proposal, the listener will disambiguate the verb “to kill” in a process of minimal effort, testing interpretive hypotheses in order of accessibility and stopping when expectations of relevance are satisfied. In this way, to obtain our interpretation we do not follow a social contract but an innate cognitive mechanism. The concept of Relevance deals with a cost/benefit calculation in terms of cognitive improvements. Hence, the audience is supposed to operate with (i) the codified meaning (ii) the interpretative hypothesis (disambiguation, referential attribution, contextual assumptions, implicatures, etc) in order to obtain the most relevant interpretation.

As we could see, there are many possibilities of approaching communication using these theories.

And we are aware of the fact students need to develop skills in reading, as well as be aware of their own perception and cognitive logical abilities. Following this vein, in classes we have the possibility to apply what researches have been finding in relation to communication, via media and art. We should call students’ attention to the human inferential ability by discussing with them simple examples in terms of language.

Levinson (2000) discusses about classes of utterances (utterance-type-meaning) that have a default interpretation, e.g. I don’t like this movie/I dislike this movie; it is possible the scene will be fantastic/ It’s not impossible the scene will be fantastic. We express ideas and intentions through our speeches and this fact should be observed in a foreign language as well.

Any scene of a movie can be used to illustrate inferences in a communicative exchange and, in addition, to stimulate the students to pay attention to the very relevant details presented. Some parts of a movie ask for the image/language, image/sound, image/language/sound relation to be understood, and that is fantastic to be discussed in class.

Moreover, different areas of the brain are activated depending on the input (visual, verbal, etc); thus, we will stimulate abilities and competences, such as language competence, attention, assumptions about the world, and memory.

To this extent, we go together with different processes and have the chance to explore film language in all its richness. Other tasks may be developed such as, for instance, to create subtitles to imagetic inputs or scenes. If we bring to class something attractive for the students and look into it attentively, we may increase students’ interest in learning language(s).

[1] From the movie A. I. – Artificial Inteligence (2001).

Note: An abridged version of this article was published in the APIRS Newsletter - July 2009.