Is it useful to watch a silent film in English?

 

In this period we are watching a film with teacher Gugliotta: Wall-E. This is a Walt Disney cartoon set in the future. In this cartoon no one speaks. Are these lessons useful to learn English? Later on I will write about the plot, now I’d like to try and answer this question.

The characters are Wall-E, Eve and the humans, who live in the space, in a very big and innovative spaceship. This is because Earth is covered with trash so it isn’t a nice planet. Wall-E is a rusty and dirty robot, and his job is to compress garbage and to build skyscrapers with it. Wall-E collects some interesting objects he finds when he works, and he puts them in his house, a broken camion. One day he finds a plant, the only form of life except his pet, a cockroach. Then, he meets another robot, Eve, and he falls in love at first sight. From now on, his life will change, and he won’t be able to return to his life before he met Eve.

He shows Eve his collection: she is looking for a form of life, so when she sees his plant, she puts it in her belly and she goes on standby. Later, the spaceship returns on Earth and it “retakes” Eve. Wall-E tries to free Eve, but he can’t, so he waits on the spaceship. He goes to space with him, and it reaches a very big spaceship, the Axiom.  The humans live there, on special robotic chairs, they don’t walk. Wall-E and Eve’s adventures start in that moment; they will take the humans back and plant the plant.

In each period we watch a part of the film, and we answer some questions about it.

Let’s go back to our question: are these lessons useful to learn English? Yes, they are. This is because although Wall-E is not a film with spoken dialogues, we are working on it: we are answering some questions in English, and we are looking up the right word for each thing we want to describe. If we hadn’t done this work, I couldn’t have written this paragraph. Before I watched this film, I didn’t know words like garbage and cockroach, and now I know them.

Jacopo Panicucci

 

Every Friday the second class has a fifty-minute lesson with a mother tongue teacher, miss. Gugliotta. In this last period the second classes are watching Wall-E, a film about a robot, who lives alone on Earth because the people went to live in space.

Wall-E lives in a garage and builds skyscrapers with garbage. He collects a lot of objects. One day a spaceship arrives and abandons another robot on earth: this is modern, defensive and aggressive. By comparison, Wall-E is old-fashioned, dirty, romantic. One day Wall-E shows Eve a plant in a boot and Eve catches it, puts it in her body and goes on standby. Wall-E tries to wake him but she is always on standby. Once Eve gets caught in a spaceship and Wall-E remains there because he falls in love with her. He manages to enter the spaceship and discovers another world in it.

Apart from watching the film, the second classes answer some questions about it.  This job aims at improving our language and pronunciation.

Francesco Bugo