Movie Magic: Using Color to Teach ESL Writing Skills

Tamara Warhol, PhD and Katherine Rhodes Fields, MFA, MA TESL

 

This project is part of the adaptable curriculum, Perceptual Prose, designed for High Intermediate or Advanced IEP/ESL writing courses.



Each skill for writing taught during the class is paired with a specific project based in a particular mode of visual learning that is carefully selected and paired together in order to achieve two primary goals, improving academic writing skills and promoting cross-cultural awareness.



Movie Magic was first implemented in a color theory class at the University level. Its original intent was as an exercise in looking for how color is used in cinema to ultimately communicate/express cultural, ideological and emotional information to audiences. As part of a second language classroom curriculum, Movie Magic provides the same exercise in understanding color as communication but now as an extension of cross-cultural understanding and a building block for stronger English writing skills. The Movie Magic project, a five part, hands-on, in class activity accompanying a class blog, incorporates the basic four skills in an IEP classroom, reading, writing, speaking and listening as well as gives focus to a multitude of crucial components used in academic writing. This project allows the student to build on knowledge and encourage fluency with a focus on form: descriptors.

​

Why Movie Magic? Movies are such a pervasive element to the cross-cultural experience. The cinematic stories lend themselves to investigate and explore how color influences the perceptions of characters and story lines while compelling the viewing audience to consider or reconsider the world of communicative language through the lens of visual story telling with color as the crux of the analysis. Incorporating the writing genre of compare and contrast falls naturally into this category since students come from such divergent cultures and benefit by looking at the similarities and differences of color in cultures and how it influences meaning, intelligibility and is a crucial part of the creative process of writing.