Teaching English through Movies: How to Do It the Communicative Way

This paper builds on a previous paper by Shim and Baik (1997), which discusses the reasons and methods for the use of movies in an EFL classroom. The basic rationale for using movies to teach English as a foreign language provided in the paper was that movies provide the type of teaching material that easily allows the teacher to implement CLT in the classroom. However, a recent survey (You, 2000) shows that the majority of the classes that use movies as teaching material do not seem to reflect the theoretical or methodological principles of CLT. This paper discusses some of the ways that movies are currently being used in the classroom in Korea in an attempt to evaluate them in light of the CLT approach.