A Study of Developing Movie-based English Textbooks

The purpose of this paper is to report the present status of movie-based English textbooks in Japan, and to introduce the ATEM (The Association of Teaching English through Movies) textbooks, explaining how and why they were first published. It is obvious that movies are very useful materials in teaching foreign languages since they demonstrate and describe many educational topics effectively. Books published in Japan focus on language acquisition, cultural aspects or political and environmental issues. The ATEM textbook, "Every Movie Tells a Story", was found to be very effective in the classroom and I am very hopeful that this study will be helpful and useful for other researchers to develop English books through movies, towards a better English education.