Trainspotting - using this film to teach English

Final year of high school english class spends 3 class hours watching the film "Trainspotting" in order to prepare for a verbal exam. The quality of teaching in german schools continues to amaze me.

So you aren't impressed that they're showing films in class then? To be honest, I think I'd rather kill myself than teach teenagers, but anyway.

I suppose it depends on how the film was used in class. Were there exercises leading up to watching the film? Was there some kind of discussion involved to talk about themes in the film? What kind of follow up activities were the students expected to do?

One of my favorite movies, I bet the kids are thrilled (unless of course they can't understand it...)

I watched all kinds of fucked up shit in spanish class...

I believe we watched a Die Toten Hosen live DVD in german class...

Well, beyond it being a cool movie, there are several themes the teacher may have selected to tie in with other curriculum or to discuss with the class: British youth culture, gender culture, drug subcultures, contrasting youth culture portrayed in the movie to dominant class culture, comparing any of those to German culture... just to name a few.

Not british culture but jock culture btw

Sorry Dave, the source I copied and pasted that from said British culture.

Well if I was teaching someone who needed to understand the accent and dialect it would be useful material.

What about the fact that the characters in the film all speak with strong Glaswegian accents?

They don't sound anything like Ski.

Did you watch Mr. Madge's (a.k.a. Guy Ritchie) Snatch for the midterm exam?

I can't think of many films worse for teaching an English class than Trainspotting, with its extremely strong dialect and mass of slang. Pulp Fiction would be much better. In German class the best we got was Go Trabi Go -- at least Claudia Schmutzler got her top off for a second (back when she was hot).

woof.

The teacher said he showed the film to show that dialects exist. Follow-up was all about film reviews.
One hand-out was about the zero state generation (handed out, not discussed).

Most kids had already seen it in german so understanding the film was no problem.

Sounds like the teacher is ready for a vacation.

I must have missed something. I thought it was set in Edinburgh.

I know what you mean though. Most English people need the subtitles on.

jay hay there is nothing glaswegian its based in Edinburgh

Great film

better than watching jane austen movies.

Leith culture more like.

Now bring me a fucking smoke rent boy!

Clockwork Orange?

At least they speak with an english accent in Clockwork orange

innit!
I think it's great that the teacher is showing the film to teach English.
I remember when I was learning French and German at school, all we had were crap textbooks about Hans and his chuffing Zahnweh or books like "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts".
Watching a Fassbinder film would - I'm sure - have held our interest for a lot longer.
Good for him/her.

we had to do Tess of the D'Urbervilles. At least we got to see natascha kinski's tits

Jenny L.,

Actually he is one of the better teachers as he says he wants to motivate the children to learn English. Other teachers in the school speak mostly German in class and use expressions, such as "I see black for you" or write in exam papers 'got lost on the side tracks', etc. I am now so appreciative that my first son was allowed to sit in Italian classes rather than suffer through the English lessons.

So what's your opinion of them showing films in class then, Salt?

One of the other teachers I worked with used to show Forrest Gump in class because Hanks talked ridiculously slow and it was easy for them to understand. I hated it though because the sound of Tom Hanks saying Jenny with that hideous southern drawl just makes my skin crawl. Another one that was really popular with the older students I taught was Ned Divine.

Actually, a lot of the younger Germans I know really like watching the stuff with slang in it. Like the others said, way better than an Austen movie.

I can think of a few others that'd be worse to show in class- Apocalypse Now, for example.

Why would apocolypse now be bad to show?

At least the students who watched trainspotting now know what a radge, a gadge and a buffty are

Dunno. I guess you could show it if you wanted. I don't care for the movie that's all.

okay Barry Norman...

I will bet everyone failed that test.

I had to google Barry Norman... but he actually has Apocalypse Now on his Top 100 Films of all time list.

Of course, he has taste.

Oh. Is that to imply that I don't?

I would never suggest that. Everyone's taste is different is all

Just wondering, is "oral exam" a rude word now?

Jenny, read the book Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) and I guarantee you will see the movie differently. I tried to watch it when I was really young and immediately wrote it off as a war movie and didn't pay any attention but when I watched it a second time after reading the book you see that there's so much more to it. The war only acts as a backdrop to a really thought provoking plot. Well, not really a backdrop as it's important but the point of the movie isn't just to watch a bunch of fighting.

The director's cut is a lot longer too paying a lot more attention to the madness that is Brando's character, makes a lot more sense.

There's also a lot more of the Playboy bunnies.

Hmmm. I haven't read the Heart of Darkness since I was about 13 or 14, but perhaps I should reread it and then watch the movie again. The other problem is that I watched the movie when I was drunk... perhaps it's one of those that's better to watch sober.

People should learn English from the Sopranos. Much better slang than that scottish stuff.

People should learn English just by going to an East London boozer - any foreigner who gets the shit kicked out of them fails the course, any that manage to get a local to buy them a drink pass with honours. Simple.

I probably wouldn't have got much out of it at 13 either. Give it another shot.

When I taught TEFL in Spain I used A Hard Day's Night, episodes of The Young Ones and Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Different (basically a film patched together from some of the best sketches in Monty Python's Flying Circus) and my students loved them.

They had complained that the videos that went with the book used in the course were boring so I said "OK, I'll bring in some of my own". If I had had Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, and the Sopranos back then I would have used them as well.


Great idea, Jimbo.

I would have loved to have had a group of juvenile delinquents from Barcelona (I called them 'the Barcelunatics' ) I taught TEFL to one summer in Ireland do your ' East London boozer course'. They were literally juvenile delinquents; they were spoilt rich kids with serious behavioural problems and were as cheeky as ----. Some of them were pretty streetwise and probably would have passed with honours. Others would have stepped over the line and got the ---- kicked out of them.

I spent 2 classes watching Braveheart with a class. They had spent the 2 previous months reading the Easy-Reader version of the book for homework and us discussing it for about 10 minutes at the start of every class. These were beginners, and we watched it in English with English subtitles. It worked surprisingly well, even with the strong accents and old-fashioned dialects. I'm sure Trainspotting could too, with the right class and teacher. I would hardly consider it appropriate for preparing for oral exams however.

@Showem,

You are right in saying with the right teacher, this film can be used effectively, especially with students who have already had 9 years of English lessons. But these students have always had teachers who only spoke German to them and they have not had much practice in speaking English. Therefore, it is a waste of precious time to watch such a movie and then only discuss film reviews in general.

I would give the students questions before each scene of a film and ask them to listen closely to the dialogue and then give me the answers to the questions

e.g. for A Hard Day's Night: Q: Who's that 'little old man'? A: Paul's grandfather
Q: Which adjective is used by several characters in the film to describe him? A: He's "(very) clean".

and so on.

Whatever vocabulary they didn't understand would be explained and discussed. They seemed to enjoy it and learnt a lot of useful phrases /vocabulary, etc.

Interesting thread and a lot of thought-provoking comments. I am an English teacher in the Black Forest and would like to make a number of points:

1. I would admit, like most of my colleagues, to using films occasionally in lessons, particularly at this time of year as the school year in BW is dragging on, but this would only be AFTER the class have done a test, not before. If the film was shown to expose the students to different accents, I can't really see what relevance TS would have to current school curricula - students are not required to reproduce Scottish accents, rather the opposite, as most parents and teachers tend to prefer RP.

2. Accents are only taken apart and examined as part of university courses where they would come under sociolinguistics.

3. TS is a questionable film in terms of the subject matter and the certificate, which according to IMDB is 16 in Germany, so the class would have to be 11th grade or above. Even if they were, I would think very seriously about it. The film has a lot of merit, but as a teacher I would be very wary of showing it as parents can be very quick to complain. ( I once had a parent complain because her 12 year-old daughter had nightmares after we had watched 'Ghostbusters')

4. Watching films is a worthwhile activity if the subject matter is relevant to material covered in class, but should be done with thought.

5. All exams are 'verbal' - in that they are written using words (maybe not maths exams?). So the word 'oral' must be used here, regardless of innuendo.

Aidan