Perhaps I should temporarily change the title of my blog to “Films for Reading Comprehension”, as I’m totally into seeing how far I can take this.
Spurred on by the effectiveness of using a short film to review WH questions with my class of 32 struggling adult learners (who need to pass a high-stakes exam) I decided to use another one this week, for the second lesson.
The students need to be familiar with a number of different types of reading comprehension questions and how to answer them. I ended the lesson today’s lesson using the short film “The Power Of Words” to highlight (or rather, put a spotlight on) YES /No questions or TRUE / FALSE questions that require the students to support their answer.
This time we watched the film before reading the questions . But I warned the students that they must pay close attention to details in order to answer the questions. Then we discussed the answer to each question. There are only five sentences on the worksheet but I felt that discussing the answers in this manner really brought the message home. For example:
For the question related to the season, everyone said “winter”. When asked to support their answer, a few students said that they knew it was winter because of the rain. I pointed out that in other countries it actually rains in the summer too so we can’t use that as proof. There was a murmur in class of “oh, I didn’t think of that”. Which is what I’m driving at – THINK before you answer! We accepted “people are wearing coats and scarves” as the proper answer.
If you think you remember reading about how I’ve used this film in the past, you are right. I have FOUR different versions/levels of worksheets for it, but naturally (is just me?) I wanted something else for today.
Here’s the film. The worksheet is below it.