· Students experience real English: different speakers, voices, accents, styles, and registers.
· Students come into contact with diversity: cultural varieties, social awareness, psychological questions, and international issues.
· The world is brought into the classroom: the English language is alive, its existence going beyond textbooks.
· Films go hand-in-hand with entertainment, thus being extremely appealing and motivating to students of all ages.
· Using films in the ELT class helps develop students’ self-esteem: when teachers choose segments carefully and work on them properly, they arouse in students feelings of achievement, pride, accomplishment, self-satisfaction and happiness. Students realize that they are able to understand parts of real films.
· Favourite actors and actresses are part of the students’ learning process, becoming language models.
· Students are exposed to a mixture of language and gestures, a combination of situational language and “spontaneous conversation”. Therefore, they are asked to decode linguistic and paralinguistic messages.
· Films provide students with both visual and auditory input, thus supporting the different learning styles and/or strategies of students.
· Language is presented as a whole: Realia is neither segmented nor graded, as is the case with videos specially designed for the teaching of English.
· The use of films is a wonderful tool: an audio-visual aid which together with the proper activities helps develop the four language skills -- even though teachers sometimes wrongly believe the focus is only on listening comprehension.
· An inviting way to learn...
