English Major Students' Attitudes towards Movies and Series as Language Learning Resources

Movies as an Audio-Visual Aid for Learning Language Communicatively

Movies or motion pictures are multiple media applications that integrate sound and image with texts usually based on dialogues. They create “diverse modalities of input” by using photography, animations, sounds, visual effects and texts (Hsu, 2014, p. 64). Because of all these instruments, they appeal to visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic learning styles. Movies provide viewers with scenes showing the kinesics (i.e. gestures and movements), chronemics (i.e. use of time) and proxemics (i.e. use of space), which are the clues of contextual communication based on what to say where, when and how. Movies are certainly not only based on images, but also textual parts, which are captions or subtitles. While watching captioned/subtitled movies or vidoes in the target language, L2 learners have to attend to two types of visual input (images and texts) as well as audio input (sounds) (Hsu, 2014, p. 64), which means they use both auditory and visual learning styles. Therefore, another benefit of using movies is to do with multimodality. Block (2014) argues for the need to move beyond lingualism and take on a multimodal approach to teaching.