Assistant professor
Seo Ji-Young

Teaching movie English, I meet more than five hundred students every semester. Using movies is definitely a fascinating way to learn English. When I ask my students what they expect to learn from movies, more than 60% of them answer that they want to learn practical expressions. They found the underlined expression below to be practical.

Ron: Ah. And how's your lovely wife? Truman: Good. Good. How about yours'? Ron: Couldn't be better!

The reason why students find this expression practical is they can use it right away in real situations. Especially if you are tired of saying "I'm fine," you might be glad and decide to use it with the first native English-speaking person you meet. However, there is hardly any chance to meet these people in Korea and nobody asks "How are you?" in English. Gradually you will forget this refreshing expression and be back to "I'm fine." This happens to us all the time because we learn English as a foreign language which means we cannot immerse ourselves in the language. In the end, the practical expression you have learnt is no longer practical. Let me tell you what is 'practical' from my point of view. First of all, practical expressions include many chunks and they should be connected to a storyline. Take sentence A) from the movie The Truman Show, for example.

A) Cristof: “As Truman grew up we were forced to manufacture ways to keep him on the island.”

Truman's life is broadcast live around the world although Truman himself is unaware of this fact. His hometown is a complete set built by Cristof who invented various ways to prevent Truman from discovering his false reality. Sentence A shows Christof's role in making an elaborate plan to deceive Truman. As this is related to Christof's key role in the movie, it is easy to remember once you have watched the movie. Also, sentence A) is divided into 3 chunks as shown in B).

B) As Truman grew up / we were forced to manufacture ways / to keep him on the island. These are chunks that you will use when speaking in English, rather than the whole sentence. By combining these kinds of chunks with chunks from other sentences, you can express your ideas effectively.

Sentence A) seems to be a bit long but once you memorize it you can kill three birds with one stone. First, your grammatical ability will improve; second, you will have expressive power; and finally, it will remain in your long-term memory.

jiyoung_seo@hanmail.net