The Big Charleston Contest

Today I got to use a technique in both of my classes I had been taught about in my CELTA training but, given the rigidity of the Shane system, never expected to have an opportunity to put into practice. I got to set up a video dictation.

Briefly, here's how a video dictation works:

You set up a video in such a way that half of your students can see the video and the other half cannot. The video is played with the sound off, and the ones who can see the video describe the video to the half who can't. Then, the ones who couldn't see the video are allowed to turn their chairs around so that they can see. The sound is turned on. The ones who viewed the video the first time around get to compare what's actually happening in the movie with what they thought was happening when the sound was out, and the ones who didn't get to view the first time around compare what was described to them with what they actually see.

The point of the exercise is give students a chance to use all the language at their disposal (what we call in EFL-speak a fluency exercise) and get a lot of practice talking.

For a video dictation, any bit of film that's highly visual will do. I have considered doing video dictations with, among other things, the scene in Roots where LeVar Burton gets spirited off into slavery, any of the various scenes in Evita where things blow up (though this poses the problem of the complicated language in the score and having to explain to an unfamiliar and probably uninterested audience the politics of Argentina in the 1940s), and the scene in Oliver! where the pickpockets play-act at being a horse and carriage. But what did I use for my first-ever video dictation?

Oh yes, oh yes--the big Charleston contest from It's a Wonderful Life.

Now, the world is divided into two groups. Scratch that. Americans are divided into two groups. Because the rest of the human species somehow manages to get from late November to December 25th every year without seeing Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fall into that swimming pool even once, let alone 500 times. There are those Americans who see It's a Wonderful Life as, at best, unbearable treacle and at worst as a complete snooze. And there are Americans who treasure it as a part of their heritage.

I confess I fall into the latter category. It's a Wonderful Life has never gotten old or stale for me. I may not longer laugh heartily every time George and Mary Charleston their way into that pool, but the scene still retains its magic as an expression of the joy life does at least occasionally offer. The rest of Christmas I was able to let go when I became a Jew. I can, with perfect equanimity, do without ornaments, Santa, or the "magic" of spending Christmas morning in the throes of materialistic excess. But I cannot do without George, Mary, Potter, the bank run, and--most especially--the whole of Bedford Falls High School Charlestoning into its swimming pool.

Two classes got to see George and Mary today. The first is my CEI10 class. This consists of two fairly advanced children, aged ten and twelve, who are bright and curious but generally pretty rambunctious. I had the twelve-year old do the talking for the video dictation because he has a better range of English; I didn't think the girl's was quite up to it. But he did pick up on a lot. For instance, he described the scene as "grandma and grandpa"--I could tell he was looking for "old-fashioned" but didn't have the English for it. The girl asked me why there was no color in the movie--I think this may have been her first encounter with a black-and-white film. I explained that the movie was old and that they didn't have color films in the old days.

With these kids, I was trying to use the movie to segue into a discussion of the present continuous, and to illustrate its meaning. For those of you who missed it in 10th-grade English, the present continuous (also known as the present progressive) is the construction was/were doing something: "While everyone was dancing, the gym floor opened up." Its function in English is to show continuous action in the past, and one of its main uses is to describe a situation around an event--what was going on when something (in the past simple) happened.

I'm not sure how well I did with conveying that bit of grammar. The twelve-year-old got it right way. The ten-year-old is still struggling with it. But I think it gives me a reference point for this in the future.

I also showed the big Charleston contest to my adult pre-intermediate class. It was a sheer delight to get to watch people encounter this scene for the first time. Americans see this movie so much that it's been a long time since I saw anyone genuinely laugh when George and Mary fall into the pool, keep right on dancing, and inspire everyone to dive right in.

But the comments were interesting. In the class, I have a married couple who are taking the course together. The wife got to watch and had to describe to the husband. He said he had not expected it to be such an old movie based on the description his wife had given him. When she said it was a high school dance (I was amazed she picked up on that detail), he had expected the people to all be much younger and the scene to be more contemporary. But they were amazingly perceptive at seeing that the one who opened up the floor was Mary's "ex-lover".