Paris Nous Appartient, by Jacques Rivette and Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, Jean- Pierre Jeunet.

Step 1Having admired French ‘cinémographie’ for a long time, I

decided to use this interest as a means to engage with the learning process and thus improve my listening skills. I

looked towards two classic films I had not seen before in order to test:

• My personal strengths and weaknesses by accessing how much I could understand;

• Whether I could use them as a means to overcome weaknesses and improve my listening skills.

These tests should help me to decide whether films are a valuable tool to be used in the future in order to develop listening skills and overall language development.

Step 2 : No Subtitles

My first step was to watch the film without subtitles. I found this challenging due to the quick pace of the natural dialogue. The second image highlights another difficulty, understanding French when the actor is in character, with his mouth full! However, watching the film without subtitles forced me to concentrate and I noted words in

French I could hear but not understand. This helped my note taking skills whilst looking them up later helped me expand my vocabulary. I found that using film in this way

made understanding idioms easier too, as I could see that the context meant I should not translate the words word for word.

Step 3: English Subtitles

I then tried to overcome the ‘pace’ problem by using the subtitle option. I found that this was helpful and improved my understanding of the film as I could match what I heard with the English equivalent. It was interesting to see how the transcribers used more natural translations compared to the

ones I found in the dictionary . However, as there was only an English subtitle option I did not feel my listening skills were improving as much as

they could do as from time to time I found myself reading the English rather than listening out for the French. So, I asked myself what I could do

and decided I should find a film which had French subtitles. This would force me to engage with the language and help me with one of my serious

problems: spelling. This is an important skill for listening exercises as misspelt words get 0 marks in exam situations.

Step 4: French Subtitles

As I hoped, I found the French subtitles extremely helpful as I was less inclined to simply read the subtitles when they were in French. When I found certain parts of the film difficult to understand the French subtitles were useful and combatted the problem I had previously found concerning the quick pace of

native speakers. I was also able to engage with the spelling of words which has helped me in class listening exercises. For example, at one point a character

mentions the word ‘chaos’. The French and English have the same spelling but different pronunciation. This word came up in a listening exam, and as I had

focused on the word during the film I was able to recognise it. If I had not, I may have been inclined to write ‘caros’ which reflects the word phonetically but does

not mean anything!

Step 5: Re-watching without subtitles

In order to assess how useful this method was I watched the film again, without subtitles and found the majority of it easy to

understand. Using French subtitles evidently helped my listening skills as they aided the expansion of my vocab and helped me recognise

words which did not ‘sound’ familiar but either shared ‘roots’ with my existing knowledge or were words I could identify in texts but had not

heard in practice.

So, are films useful tools to tackle language learning?

• Yes! - I found this exercise useful and feel confident that next time I will recognise the vocabulary and, if I do it often enough, will feel more confident listening to the natural pace of native French conversations.

• My class work experience reflects that I am able to recognise words I heard in the film.

• I will continue to watch French films for future language development.

• HOWEVER: this process highlights that I need to use French subtitles rather than English ones, and take notes of words as it is clear I need to also expand my vocabulary. I will therefore take sometime to do this and explore different ways to increase my vocabulary.