A Study on Making Lessons Both Interesting and Necessary Using Captions: With Reference to the Movie Brave

This study suggests an approach to lessons for low-intermediate learners that are both interesting and necessary. Swain (1995) argues that learners have a conflict between semantic processing (interest) and syntactic processing (necessity). Ellis (2015) stated that it is important to have necessary lessons (language-centered) while making them interesting (content-oriented). To do this, the American animation, Brave, was used with Korean subtitles. The participants were three first year non - English majors. Korean subtitles were used for them to facilitate access to understanding because translating the script and understating the meaning put a burden on their learning. As a result, the participants preferred language-based forms and multi-word units rather than individual words. It can be inferred from this that, first, low-intermediate learners prefer interesting lessons; second, they hope to use dialogue or language in the short term; third, they like easily accessible English learning. The results showed that at least the first two steps were achieved in the four SLA processing steps (noticing, patterning, controlling and lexicalizing) proposed by Skehan (2002). In this respect, this study showed the possibility of integrating interest with necessity in lessons. Future work remains to be done on intermediate and advanced learners.