Liou's (1994) IVD-based model and application : From a non-courseware supported perspective

Generally speaking, Liou’s IVD project has good implementation for CALL in classroom. This project is suitable for individual learning in front of a PC workstation, which provides a language learning courseware particularly designed for a movie. This IVD-based learning project weighs a lot because it gives students sufficient exposure to authentic English used in daily life. In her experiment, Liou has developed a four-unit teaching model to explore a movie. Admittedly, it is highly efficient to have readily available software assisting the learning, yet a more common fact is that many IVD resources are ‘original’, with no readily made learning software embedded in them. Then, how do we English language teachers make use of good movies for our teaching?

First, the plot of the movie should be made clear to the students. Instead of the embedded questions as shown in Figure 4 of Liou’s paper (p. 60), the teacher can show the students with prepared questions on a separate PowerPoint slide or Word document, to give the learners contextual hints or guidance for understanding the synopsis. It is worth mentioning that, as the movie is played to the whole class, each student should also be able to play the movie on their workstations. Wherever the teacher stops the movie and raises relevant questions, the students are going to rewind the film and look for the answers.

Second, the content of the movie needs to be ‘comprehensible’ to the students. By 'comprehensible' I mean that learners need to know the intended meaning of the speaker not only by consulting a dictionary, but more importantly, by reflecting how the learners themselves would have expressed the same meaning. For example, the students may hear a movie character say ‘Tom has been capped for his school rugby team for twice’. They’ve got to understand the past participle ‘capped’ in this utterance, and come up with their own interpretation like ‘Tom played for his school rugby team for twice’. Then the students are going to look at the context in which the word ‘capped’ is employed. At this point, the teacher can provide as much supporting information as possible, such as asking questions like ‘Is it used in a dialogue or a monologue? ’, ‘Is it a formal speech or a casual talk?’, or ‘What is the social identity of the speaker?’ and so on.

Last but not least, the students should be given access to online resources such as google.com, Google Dictionary, Wikipedia, and so on, whenever they have difficulty understanding the movie.