Bend it Like Beckham in the EFL-Classroom Preparing Students for the Matura with Popular Film

Masterarbeit zur Erlangung des Mastergrades an der Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Salzburg Fachbereich: Anglistik und Amerikanistik Gutachter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ralph Poole, MA

eingereicht von Dr. Michaela Baur, B.Ed.(Univ.)

Salzburg April 2018

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 1 The Austrian Matura ...... 5 1.1 The “Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit (VWA) ...... 6 1.2 The written part of the Matura ...... 7 1.2.1 Skills tested in the written exam ...... 7 1.2.1.1 Reading ...... 8 1.2.1.2 Listening ...... 11 1.2.1.3 Language in Use ...... 15 1.2.1.3.1 Vocabulary ...... 16 1.2.1.3.2 Grammar ...... 18 1.2.1.4 Text Writing ...... 20 1.2.1.4.1 The essay ...... 21 1.2.1.4.2 The article ...... 21 1.2.1.4.3 The report ...... 21 1.2.1.4.4 The blog...... 21 1.2.1.4.5 The email ...... 22 1.3 The oral part ...... 22 1.3.1 Skills tested in the oral Matura ...... 22 1.3.1.1 Pronunciation ...... 25 1.3.1.2 Pragmatics ...... 26 1.3.1.3 Culture ...... 28 2 Film in the Austrian Curriculum for English ...... 31 2.1 Why teachers should show films ...... 32 2.1.1 Formal and Informal Language/Colloquial language ...... 35 2.1.2 Culture ...... 36 2.1.3 Grammar ...... 37 2.1.4 Speaking - Vocabulary ...... 37 2.1.5 Speaking – Pronunciation and Intonation ...... 38 2.1.6 Listening ...... 38 2.1.7 Reading ...... 39 2.1.8 Writing ...... 40 2.2 Challenges in showing films in school ...... 40 2.3 Approaches of using films in the language classroom ...... 41 2.4 Subtitles ...... 44

3 From Literacy to Film Literacy ...... 47 3.1 What is literacy? ...... 47 3.2 What is film literacy?...... 48 4 Teaching Bend It like Beckham – Film Analysis ...... 55 4.1 Step one – The Plot ...... 55 4.2 Step two – The Characters ...... 55 4.3 Step three – Technical elements of a film ...... 56 4.4 Step four – Film theories – ideology and message ...... 56 4.4.1 Psychoanalytical Film Theory ...... 58 4.4.2 Marxist Film Theory ...... 59 4.4.2.1 Ethnic identity and class ...... 60 4.4.3 Genre Theory ...... 60 4.4.4 Feminist/Gender Film Theory ...... 62 4.4.4.1 Multiculturalism and Gender ...... 64 4.4.5 Queer Film Theory ...... 64 4.4.5.1 Women, Sport and Sexuality/Homosexuality ...... 66 4.4.6 Reception Theory ...... 67 4.5 Activities for using Bend it Like Beckham in school ...... 68 4.5.1 Intercultural aspects ...... 69 4.5.1.1 Social groups – ethnic identity/integration ...... 69 4.5.1.2 Football ...... 70 4.5.2 Social groups (minorities – Indians in the United Kingdom) ...... 71 4.5.3 Tradition and Change ...... 74 4.5.3.1 Religion ...... 74 4.5.4 The role of women ...... 74 4.5.4.1 Prejudices – social groups ...... 75 4.5.5 Living – housing ...... 75 4.5.6 School and education ...... 76 4.5.7 Personal future...... 76 4.6 Linguistic and grammatical features ...... 77 4.6.1 Phrasal verbs and idioms ...... 77 4.6.2 Different registers ...... 78 4.7 Using Bloom’s Taxonomy ...... 78 5 Conclusion ...... 80 6 Bibliography...... 86 7 Appendix ...... 92 8 Eidesstattliche Erklärung ...... 100

List of Abbreviations

Common European Framework of Reference for Languages CEFR Mother tongue L1 Foreign language/Second language L2 Content and language integrated learning CLIL

1

Introduction Students taking their school-leaving exams in Austrian grammar schools need to prove that they are competent users of English. Instructions and schoolbooks might not suffice as resources for reaching this goal. Popular films as an additional exciting opportunity are the missing link to equip students with the language skills they need to be competent language users in the 21st century. Films are one means to assist students in learning not only the four skills traditionally taught for years but also cultural and intercultural skills as well as film literacy skills needed to be competent users of English. Whereas until the last decade “media education” was considered to deal with film and television, nowadays it is more about new media and digital technologies. For this work, however, media education is seen as encompassing education about film and thus I will use the narrower term “film education” as it is popular film(s) that this thesis is about.

In Austrian grammar schools, students need to take the school-leaving exam – the Matura – in their 12th school year. For this work, I will deal exclusively with the school-leaving exams taken in Austrian grammar schools (Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schule – AHS). The upper forms are comprised of four years with the Matura taken towards the end of the final year. Alongside the AHS, Austrian students can also opt for vocational schools (five years of upper form) which also have a Matura exam at the end. Three years ago, there was a huge Matura reform and the school-leaving exam became centralised. This means that the written Matura for English comprises listening, reading, language in use as well as writing tasks which are designed by a group of experts and must be completed by all school-leavers in Austria. Students can additionally opt for an oral exam in English in which they must be able to hold a five-minute- monologue and have a conversation for about ten minutes. The oral exam is not centralised. The tasks are designed by the individual teachers but the assessment scale is the same across Austria1. Apart from lexical accuracy and grammatical control, teachers need to assess whether students are able to react in a natural way and use conversation fillers that are used in authentic speech. Furthermore, the students need to show a high degree of fluency and spontaneity when speaking about a certain topic. These are very demanding skills and it takes a lot of effort from students and teachers alike to prepare for the exam. All skills can quite easily be acquired by spending time in an English-speaking country or – somewhat less effectively but still to a

1 Assessment scales for the oral and the written exam are on page 90-92 in the appendix of this thesis. 1 satisfactory level – with traditional teaching which adds movies as resources for teaching and learning authentic speech.

In 1971, Masley Kirkton, a researcher in the field of teaching English, stated that “in the beginning film was a toy – a simple on-the-screen amusement. Today, however, the medium has moved into the home, subtly influencing what we are and what we are in the process of becoming” (831). As the quote is quite dated, it becomes obvious that is not new to use popular films in the English language classroom. With the emergence of the video in the 1970s and 1980s, films have found their way into teaching. In most cases, however, films are or have been used as pure entertainment at the end of a school term when students do not have to take any tests or exams any more. Luckily, this situation is about to change. More and more teachers have become aware of the potential of popular films for the language teaching and learning process. After all, the “wise educator does not ignore the popularity of film and instead learns how to use it” (Vetrie 40).

Fischer and Petro criticize that a single comprehensive volume on teaching film (2) does not exist but rather journals or books which include various sections that can be used for teaching, such as the British Film Institute or US film journals (e.g. Cinema Journal). What does exist, however, are a number of different, mostly small-scale, studies targeting a specific skill or element relevant to teaching film. Various researchers have attempted to show the various benefits of using films in the classrooms (Kabooha 2016, Ismaili 2013, Goctu 2017). Pastor (2013) conducted a study to show that it is better to use audio-visual material rather than listening materials for vocabulary development. Similarly, Bal-Gezegin (2014) stressed the motivational factor in using films in the classroom and stated that video usage in class depends largely on the creativity of the respective teacher. Xhemaili (2013) dealt with the enhancing of students’ reading skills in the EFL classroom and Chao (2013) highlighted the potential of films for intercultural learning. The important and sometimes controversial topic of subtitling was summarised by Hayati and Mohmedi (2011) as well as by Rokni and Ataee (2014). It is interesting to see that most of these studies were undertaken outside the USA and the United Kingdom. This is understandable because it is non-native speakers who are primarily interested in using English films in language teaching. As a consequence, a distinction must be made between the field of film studies undertaken in the USA or the United Kingdom (or other English-speaking countries where the field of film studies does not have an established and long-standing position within academia) and film studies outside the English native-speaking

2 world. To my knowledge, there has been no publication dealing with the effects films can have on the development of the skills needed for the Austrian school-leaving exam.

As a concrete example, the film Bend it Like Beckham was chosen for this thesis. It was released in 2002 and since then has attracted the attention of many teachers and researchers. In the activity section of this thesis, the specific indications for minutes of the film are given. These minutes should make it easier to find a specific scene in the film and refer to the German cover version of the film that was released in 2004 and has the German as well as the English language version. Especially for less experienced students, it might be an option to show the German version of a scene in order to make sure they really understand what they hear. Furthermore, the German and the English version can be used for a translation analysis to find out what kind of compromises have to be found in order to translate certain language elements.

Naturally, the topic of multiculturalism and gender has been the focus of investigation when dealing with Bend it Like Beckham (Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb 2015). Ethnic identity and integration was the focus of Bisin et al. (2016). Gera Roy (2006) was interested in translating differences in Bend it Like Beckham and Caudwell (20009) and Lindner (2011) looked at women, sport and sexuality as well as the lesbian potential of the film. Apart from research articles, there are also pedagogical resources and booklets devoted to the usage of the film in classrooms. Three publications are particularly useful as they offer extensive ready- made materials and worksheets for usage in the English classroom (Hildebrand et al.2007, Anslinger and van Els 2005 or Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 2007). The ample offer of ready- made teaching and learning resources is one of the reasons why Bent it Like Beckham is very well-suited for language teaching. Due to the extensive materials, it may well be that certain tasks that are proposed in this thesis resemble those of other authors. If a reference to another author should be missing it is not intentional. I have tried to assemble my own tasks but as teaching traditions and task development follow certain conventions it might happen that similarities occur. They are, by no means, intentional and they are not intended to violate any copyright laws.

The first part of this thesis is concerned with the Austrian school-leaving exam, the Matura. The modalities of the exam are presented as well as the skills tested in the written and the oral part. The second chapter tries to answer the question of why teachers should show films in the language classroom apart from offering entertainment for the students. The different skills

3 that can be learned and practised when watching films are looked at in some detail as well as challenges that might occur when doing film-based instruction. Afterwards, the development from literacy towards film literacy is described. Comparisons are made between literary and cinematic codes and the four layers of film literacy are explained. Chapter four is quite extensive and deals with the concrete film example Bend it Like Beckham. The film analysis starts by looking at the plot, the characters and technical elements of the film. As students should become media literate, they could do some research on selected websites (e.g. http://benditlikebeckhamguide.weebly.com/bend-it-like-beckham-plot.html) themselves and present their findings in class. The fourth step of the analysis are the film theories and their respective ideologies and messages they convey. Students should become aware that theories that are applied when analysing works of literature are also at play when analysing films. A final and extensive part is concerned with different activities that can be used in English language teaching when showing Bend it Like Beckham. Contrary to other publications (and teaching traditions) that list pre-, while- and post-listening activities for the film, this thesis is more concerned with tasks that help students build those skills that they need for their Matura. This is not to state that the distinction of different phases in teaching should not be respected when showing films. The only reason is the different focus that this thesis has. Tasks are chosen according to the topics students need to be familiar with for their exam. One prominent topic which is well presented in the film, is English culture. The different aspects, like home, garden, living, are examined in detail. Moreover, linguistic and grammatical features that are assessed in the oral exam are presented. A final sub-chapter deals with Bloom’s Taxonomy and the enhancements that were made in order to develop a digital taxonomy for using films in language teaching. For the Matura, students have to fulfil tasks based on various function words which are the basis of the taxonomy. The tasks suggested here are only a selection of what is possible when dealing with Bend it Like Beckham.

I have already dealt with the topic of learning theories as well as the development of the four skills in a different publication2. This is why the theory on the skills development is quite similar and at various occasions I cite from my own work.

2 Baur, Michaela. English for Foreign Premier League Football Players. Linguistic needs, tutoring options and support mechanisms – A framework for an ESP course. PhD dissertation at the University of Zurich, 2011. 4

1 The Austrian Matura3 2004 was a very important year for the Austrian school system because the national curriculum for modern foreign languages in all forms of higher secondary education was changed. This was necessary because Austria committed itself to the regulations of the Bologna process. This process wanted to harmonise tertiary qualifications in Europe. Certificates and qualifications should be comparable across Europe. Before 2004, Austria’s curriculum was knowledge-based and the focus was on topics, grammatical structures, as well as literary works. It was the responsibility of individual teachers in every school to design the school-leaving exams for their students as well as grade them. The two main criteria to be tested were reading and writing. With the adoption of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in 2004 there was a shift away from the knowledge-based towards a skills-based and communicative curriculum and the parity of the four skills had formally found its way into the language classrooms. The CEFR is a publication of the Modern Languages Division of the Council of Europe and has become the basis for curricula, school books and exams in Europe. Communicative activities are split up into sub-skills (e.g. information exchange, reading for orientation, informal discussion, etc.) with different levels of competence ranging from A1 (lowest level) to C2 (near-native speaker level). B2 as the relevant CEFR level for the Austrian Matura states that an independent user, Can understand the main ideals of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

Novelties of the introduction of the CEFR were the activity-based approach as well as the fact that instead of four skills, five skills were introduced. The skill of speaking was divided into the two sub-skills interactive and productive. This is why the oral part of the Austrian Matura consists of two parts – a monologue as well as a dialogue.

For three years after the adoption of the CEFR in 2004, however, only some teachers stuck to the CEFR standards and what was more, there was no impact on the school-leaving examinations. Teaching was officially organised based on a communicative, CEFR-based

3 Most of this information was taken from the website of the University of Innsbruck who did a lot of work for the Matura reform in Austria, https://www.uibk.ac.at/srp/ (30.3.2018). 5 curriculum but the Matura was not. As there was no official pressure, only the more enthusiastic and motivated teachers felt obliged to teach according to the CEFR.

After a pilot project to develop a new CEFR-based school-leaving exam for English and French at the University of Innsbruck, the government passed a new educational bill, so the exam reform finally became legally binding. In contrast to, for example England, the Austrian centralised exam is only centralised when it comes to designing the tasks. The assessment of the students’ performances is not done centralised but by every teacher individually. This is due to the fact that Austria is not a country that is used to external assessment. However, the advantage to pre-reform years is, that teachers get a correction key as well as criteria for assessing the texts which are standardised for every school (Spöttl et al. 3-11).

Students taking the Austrian Matura in English at a “Allgemeinbildende höhere Schule” have to pass a final school-leaving exam consisting of three parts – the Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit, a written exam and an oral exam. Students in Austria have to take their Matura in one “living” language (as opposed to Latin). In an overwhelming majority of cases this is English. Whereas most students opt for English in their written exam, it is not obligatory to take English for the oral part as well. Students can choose between a variety of other subjects but for quite a number of students English is the favoured option.

In order to be able to sit the Matura, students have to pass the 8th form of a grammar school (12th school year). They can then decide whether they would like to take three written and three oral or four written and two oral exams. The whole Matura is a three-pillar-model consisting of the Vorwissenschaftlichen Arbeit, the written as well as the oral part. Since the school year 2014/2015, the Matura has been centralised, meaning that the tasks are designed by one institution and are sent to all Austrian schools shortly before the exam. The rationale behind this procedure is transparency and comparability of students’ performances internationally as well as nationally. It should also contribute to an improvement of quality as well as knowledge and competences on part of the students.

1.1 The “Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit (VWA) The Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit (VWA) is the first of the three pillars of the Austrian Matura and should prepare students for their university life. They are required to write a paper about a chosen topic (approximately 30 pages) in which they show that they can work (pre-) 6 academically. Students should choose an adequate topic and work as autonomously as possible. One teacher supports them as a mentor during their writing process. They should be able to show cause and effect, use suitable sources and (pre-) academic methods. Writing the VWA should foster logical and critical thinking4. Once the students have finished writing this paper, they also need to present their findings to a panel of teachers. The VWA can also be written and presented in English. The writing and presenting of the VWA is finished shortly before the actual written part of the exam starts.

1.2 The written part of the Matura Students who want to take their written school-leaving exams in an Austrian grammar school need to take their exams in German, Maths and one or two other subjects. It is required, though, that they sit their exam in one (living) language whereby the majority opts for English. Hence, teachers of English try very hard already from the fifth form on, to equip them with the skills they need for the centralised written exam.

1.2.1 Skills tested in the written exam The written Matura in English consists of a receptive and a productive part. The receptive part is divided into listening and reading skills whereas in the productive one the students need to master a language in use (grammar and vocabulary) part and need to write a long text (400 words) as well as a short text (250 words). Both parts need to be passed in order for the exam to be positive.

The following sub-paragraphs list those skills that Austrian students need to master in order to pass their school-leaving exams. It is an enumeration of the already widely acknowledged (four) skills that are applicable to the learning of any language. Among these four skills are reading, writing, listening and speaking. As noted earlier, with the adoption of the CEFR, the skill of speaking was divided into a monologue and a dialogue. In recent years, many different teaching strategies have been developed in order to best teach these skills. All the strategies differ a lot depending which learning theory one follows. What research findings demonstrate, however, is that “without explicit and form-focused instruction, extensive exposure to meaning-based

4 Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung. Standardisierte kompetenzorientierte Reifeprüfung an AHS. https://bildung.bmbwf.gv.at/schulen/unterricht/ba/reifepruefung.html#heading_Warum_eine_neue_Reifepr_fung _

7 input does not lead to the development of syntactic and lexical accuracy in a second language (L2)” (Hinkel 111).

1.2.1.1 Reading Reading tasks are the first part of the written Matura and last for 60 minutes. There are always three reading texts with different test formats and levels of difficulty. The texts are authentic and are taken from e.g. newspapers, internet blogs, brochures, magazines, etc. Teaching materials or materials which were specifically written for L2 learners should be avoided. The texts can be narrative, descriptive, argumentative, expository or persuasive. The register can be formal or informal and written in literary or non-literary style.

The task types are multiple choice, multiple matching (including gapped variety), note form (sentence completion, table completion, gap filling) sequencing as well as true/false-exercises. For the true/false exercises students additionally need to give a justification for their answers. In order for students to be able to master the reading tasks, it is – like for the listening tasks – necessary that teachers provide them with similar formats right from the beginning of the upper form. It is not always easy to do the tasks as for most of the students the speed of reading must be interrupted as gaps have to be filled. The potential answers for the gaps are mostly found on a different page so that students have to look at two different pages. Even though authentic texts are chosen, the way of dealing with them is unnatural. It therefore takes some time for the students to get accustomed to this way of dealing with a reading text.

Similarly to listening, the skill of reading was in the past often considered a rather passive skill. This view has changed dramatically over time. Nowadays, reading is also seen as a way of improving the communicative competence of the language learner. Reading texts was tradtionally used to teach other skills, like pronunciation, vocabulary or structure. In a lesson that is specifically dedicated to reading, teachers should not only focus on the language skills but use texts that really entertain and motivate the students.

When reading a text in class teachers should – similar to the skill of listening – introduce pre- reading, while-reading and post-reading activities and questions in order for the learners to know what piece of information to concentrate on. Furthermore, it is important to teach specific reading skills that also occur in real-life situations. Nuttall states, that “reading has one overriding purpose: to get meaning from a text” (4). In real life, we seldom read a text in which 8 every single paragraph is of equal importance to us. Sometimes we read the whole text, or we just look for the information we need, we look for certain words or phrases that are important to us or in other occasions we choose not to read certain paragraphs at all. Grabe and Stoller identify the following seven purposes for reading (13): 1. Reading to search for simple information 2. Reading to skim quickly 3. Reading to learn from texts 4. Reading to integrate information 5. Reading to write (or search for information needed for writing) 6. Reading to critique texts 7. Reading for general comprehension

Although reading activities should be similar to real-life reading situations, it is clear that on some occasions teachers want to use the reading of texts to highlight specific grammatical constructions or certain phrases but this use of texts should not be the predominant one. If someone decides to read – no matter what text – the meaning is always at the heart of the activity. Nuttall identifies four kinds of meaning that a text can have: conceptual meaning (the meaning a word can have on its own), propositional meaning (the meaning a sentence can have on its own), contextual meaning (the meaning a sentence can have only when in context) and pragmatic meaning (the meaning a sentence has only as part of the interaction between writer and reader) (21). These meanings should be respected in a teaching process when dealing with a text.

There are many theories on how to read and consequently analyse a text. It is, however, not so easy to define what an analysis of a text really is. Rosenblatt put forward the idea that cognitive as well as affective aspects of consciousness are activated when reading a text. What she means by that is that there are two kinds of readings as the reader has “selective attention” (101). Either one concentrates on efferent elements or the meaning (what is to be retained after the reading) or on the aesthetic aspect (what the reader experiences while reading the text). In her transactional theory, Rosenblatt sees both reader and text as active. As any film can also be seen as a text, it is essential that teachers set tasks that cater for the efferent as well as the aesthetic component of analysis (101).

The main problem for foreign readers lies in the fact that their vocabulary is far smaller than that of the author of the text. As soon as a foreign reader tries to decode the meaning of a particular text, he/she automatically becomes an active part or the reading process. This clearly 9 disproves the traditional assumption that reading is only a passive skill. Furthermore, reading is an interaction as the reader and the writer depend on one another and the reader assumes that he/she and the writer are using the same language, that the writer has a message and that the writer wants the reader to understand the message (11).

Fluency in reading, whether in the mother tongue (L1) or in the foreign language (L2) takes time to develop. Students first and foremost need a certain knowledge of the new language elements – especially vocabulary, grammar and discourse structure (Saville-Troike 156). Research has shown that L2 reading comprehension can be improved if reading strategies are taught explicitly. Ediger gives various recommendations for teachers that contribute to effective reading. Teachers should put a clear focus on establishing a purpose for reading. This correlates with the claim that reading text should be as authentic as possible. Moreover, reading should extend over time and teachers should help students understand when and where to use reading strategies. Students should be taught to monitor how they are doing in their strategy use and they should get information about the benefits of the different strategies. It is important that teachers collect a variety of materials in different genres around a single topic, and explore or develop a collection of news articles on a single subject (316-318).

Concerning reading strategies, it is essential that teachers present different ones to their students. Of course, it always depends on the purpose of reading as to which strategy to use. If a reader only looks for specific information within a text, he/she can scan the text for this piece of information. If reading for gist is what he/she needs, then the skill of skimming is more important. Reading comprehension and reading speed are connected. It has been found out that good readers do not read word after word but divide a text into units of meaning that consist of several words. (Nuttall 55).

One of the most important reading skill is to decide which unknown words are important for understanding the text. Learners need to learn when to ignore difficult words. This process takes time and the skill can only be learnt through reading practice. Words are considered difficult when they are, for example, idioms, have several meanings, are highly technical or ironic.

To succeed in the reading part of the Matura, students should read the text as well as all the questions attentively. They should then identify the suitable paragraph where the answer to a

10 particular question can be found. For all test formats, only one answer is correct. In case of an exception (for particular matching exercises), this is clearly stated.

1.2.1.2 Listening The second part of the written Matura consists of three authentic listening tasks. Different test formats are used which can range from multiple-choice, to matching exercises as well as short- answer exercises. The three listening tasks vary in their degree of difficulty. The speakers have different accents, talk with a varying pace and in most cases there are background noises in order to make the listening more authentic. There is always a balance between male and female speakers of different ages. When it comes to accents, there is a variety of standard native and non-native accents with various speed of delivery.

The reason why listening is an integral part of the Matura is the fact that during an average day, people speak for 35%, they read 16%, they write 9% and they listen for 40% of their time (Andorfer et al. 3). Even though listening consists of a collaborative (listening and speaking) and a non-collaborative part, only the non-collaborative one can be tested in the written exam. In real-life conversations, people have the chance to ask when they did not understand what was said. As this is not possible in a written exam that is simultaneously taken by a group of students, the recording is played twice. Thus, the students have the chance, to listen again to those utterances that they did not understand the first time. There are quite a few challenges for students when having to do the listening exercises. What is more, an additional challenge poses the format of the exercises. The students need to be familiar with the special formats in order to be able to concentrate 100% on the spoken language.

The listening part of the Matura lasts for 40 minutes. Every exercise consists of an instructional part and the respective exercises. In many cases, there is also a picture accompanying the instructions in order to give some hints to the topic. The very first task of every exercise is given as an example. All the tasks must come in chronological order of the spoken text. In the tasks the spoken text is paraphrased in order to exclude the risk that students just listen for one single word and do not really need to understand what they hear. There is a limited pool of tasks that are used for the Matura. They comprise multiple-choice tasks, short-answer tasks (students need to answer in no more than four words) and matching tasks (with more distractors than possible answers so to avoid guessing). The sources of the recordings are taken, e.g. from the radio, the internet, audio books or can be self-created. Students need a lot of practise to be able to 11 complete such tasks. This is why these standardised formats are practised in English teaching in all the four years of the upper form of an AHS leading to the Matura.

Kusumarasdyati states that “the role of listening in EFL learning can hardly be downplayed because the acquisition of this receptive skill becomes a vital prerequisite of good speaking ability” (1). Listening has traditionally been understood as a rather passive skill but in recent decades this view has changed. Nowadays listening is seen as a complex process that involves various skills. Underwood (1) defines listening as “the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear”. Listening is considered to be the most difficult skill to learn as it involves a variety of different subskills like phonetics, phonology, prosody, lexis, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. (Martínez-Flor, Usó-Juan 29).

Similarly, Rixon defines four main sources of listening difficulty (38). For him the problems lie in the weak relationship between English sounds and the way they are spelt in the written language, the changes in sounds when they occur in rapid, connected speech, the rhythm pattern of English speech, as well as in the different ways of pronouncing the “same” sound. Listening is always an active process which encompasses different phases. The sounds need to enter our aural system, are then processed and at a later stage the listener constructs a meaning from them. In order to construct a meaning, a listener always needs a context while he/she processes the sounds. All these processes happen within a very short time-span. Therefore, comprehension is even more difficult for foreigners. When we teach listening we want the students to attend to what they hear, to process it, to understand it, to interpret it, to evaluate it and to respond to it (Underwood 4).

Foreign listeners to English conversations are faced with the challenge that English has vowel sounds and consonant clusters that might not exist in the mother tongue of the listener. Also, the rhythm, intonation and stress of the language differ a lot from other languages. The speech itself might be organised in a different way, too. What is more, like in other languages, the spoken language is a lot different from the written one. Listeners also need to recognise transition words, predict what the speaker will say next and identify what the speaker really means. An L2 learner needs fewer words to understand spoken English than written English. Sometimes learners understand written English but have problems with listening.

12

Saville-Troike states that beginning L2 learners can start to create sense from auditory input most easily if they know in advance what the speaker is going to be talking about; if key words and phrases are learnt as recognition vocabulary elements before they are encountered in connected speech; if speakers pause frequently at boundaries between parts of sentences; if auditory messages are supported by visual images (including writing) and if the communicative situation is a reciprocal one that allows the listener to seek repetition and clarification, or to ask the speaker to slow down (161).

Listening at the initial phase of the communicative teaching approach – due to technical limitations – meant to listen to cassettes. Nowadays teachers use CDs and also try to teach listening by watching a dialogue on video or DVD. This has the advantage that learners also see the context as well as people’s gestures and thus makes listening easier for them. When teaching listening, the tutor should make sure to include different phases. There should be a pre-listening phase in which the teacher clearly explains the learners what is awaiting them. The context is established, motivation for listening is created and only critical vocabulary is explained. Furthermore, students should be asked to complete different pre-listening activities such as looking at pictures, reading a text, getting familiar with the questions to be answered during listening, etc. While listening, the students should also complete certain activities which can range from marking items in pictures, putting pictures in order, to completing grids and the more traditional true-false, gap-filling and multiple-choice exercises. Such exercises are necessary as a self-evaluation for the students, without which they may think that they have understood everything but in reality they have probably missed important points of the conversation. What is most important between the first and the second listening is to present questions. Only then do the listeners know what they are listening for.

The listening activity often serves as the starting point for discussions and talks within the classroom. Post-listening activities are important to sum up the topic and give the students the chance to participate in the whole process of dealing with a particular topic in various ways. Until now they were only the silent listeners but after the listening activity they know a lot about the topic and can state their own opinions. In the past, listening activities were used to reinforce recently taught grammar. But as Field (2008:16) notes, “in the end, lessons often focused more on discussing the language of the recording than on practising listening.”

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What is important, though, is the separation of the spoken and the written word. Students should get a transcript of the listening activity at the end of the lesson in order to recognise the words that have been spoken. What has been recognised in recent years, is the problem of checking understanding through comprehension questions. A lot of reading and writing is involved in such exercises, and the teacher cannot tell whether the student did not understand the listening text or simply could not read correctly. The solution to this problem is task-based activities, like completing grids or filling in forms.

There has been some dispute in the educational world also whether recorded material should be authentic or non-authentic. Non-authentic material has the disadvantage that it leads the students to false expectations about “real” speech, whereas authentic material presents language that is really spoken by native people. It has often been argued that authentic materials are too difficult for young learners or learners who have just started learning the language. The counter argument is that authentic materials can be used at any stage of learning if the tasks are matched accordingly. Field even states that “it is clear, that true authenticity cannot be achieved in the language classroom – and perhaps least of all in the listening classroom” (284). However for him, the value of authentic recordings lies in the fact that they represent a form of speech that is different from purpose-designed materials and that they provide the learners with a listening experience that is similar to real life, in that parts of the input will not be understood by the listener. In real life, we mostly listen for a purpose and with certain expectations and we make an immediate response to what we hear. We see the person we are listening to and there are some visual or environmental clues as to the meaning of what is heard. The stretches of heard discourse come in short chunks. Most heard discourse is spontaneous and differs from formal spoken prose. Different studies (c.f. Long 1996 in Bell 2006:2) show that native speakers normally adjust their speech when talking to non-native speakers. They use syntactic and lexical simplifications, shorter sentences, a restricted range of vocabulary and speak at a slower range than they would to a native speaker.

In the past, people sometimes argued that it is not possible to teach listening. Even though we do not know what happens exactly in a learner’s brain when they try to listen, we can help them to understand spoken language better. Underwood states that students will become more proficient listeners to English if (1) they apply the strategies they use naturally in mother-tongue listening and not try to listen to every single word; (2) they increase their knowledge of the

14 cultural context in which the language is being spoken and (3) if they accept that partial interpretation of what they hear is often sufficient for understanding (22).

When preparing the students for the listening part of the Matura, teachers can support them in various ways. It is clear that in order for learners to be able to understand a spoken text they have, among others, to be familiar with the grammar, the phonetics and the vocabulary of the foreign language. In addition to these prerequisites, it is necessary to teach them how to listen to someone strategically. For example, it does not make sense to think about one word or one phrase that the student has not understood. During the time they try to make sense of it, they will have missed the rest of the talk. It is important that students adjust to the given topic. In most cases, there is a picture as well as a short description about what is going on. Learners need to be ready for topic-specific words that might occur. Furthermore, it is advisable to use the time before the listening section wisely. Students need to know what format the exercises have, what exactly is being asked (e.g. they could mark the key words in the given statements) and what kind of answer should be given (e.g. details, information that is not explicitly stated, etc.). If possible, students should answer the questions during the first listening and use the second round just for corrections.

1.2.1.3 Language in Use For their Matura, students need to complete exercises that test their knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and spelling. The tested areas are now called “Language in Use” (LIU), last for 45 minutes and can only be partly learned by heart by the students. Some years ago (before the Matura reform), isolated grammar items were tested. Those times are long gone and students need to prove that they have a thorough understanding of the grammar as well as the words of the English language. This knowledge needs a lot of time to build and to some extent certain exercises can only be fully completed if students have “a feel” for the language. The LIU part of the Matura tests whether the students have a good command of the structural and lexical range as well as orthographic control of the English language. They need to master all basic grammatical structures (e.g. appropriate choice of tense, passives, conditionals, modal verbs, comparison of adverbs), understand complex structure and vary usage through paraphrases. Furthermore, students need to have good control of synonyms and opposites of many common words in different contexts, recognise words with more than one meaning and have knowledge in the field of word formation as well as phrasal verbs. Good control of spelling and accents is also assessed. Basis for this assessment are parts or whole authentic texts taken from e.g.

15 newspapers, the internet, books, magazines whereby the nature of content is always concrete. Test methods for the LIU exercises are multiple choice, editing, word formation, banked gap- fill and open gap-fill tasks. Most difficult for students, are editing tasks whereby they have to read a text where they have to decide – line by line – whether the text is correct. In some instances, a line is correct and in others an unnecessary or grammatically incorrect word was added. If they spot a wrong word, they have to write it next to the respective line. If they think everything is correct, they have to tick the line. With such a task, grammatically difficult structures should be assessed.

Equally challenging are word-formation exercises. For the most difficult exercises, not even the base word is given. Correct word forms have to be put into a text. For example, a verb needs to be changed into a noun or an adjective or opposites have to be formed (e.g. possible – impossible). In order to complete such a task, students have to infer from the context what kind of word needs to be filled in. Furthermore, they have to have knowledge about vocabulary and word formation in order to find the correct word. Editing and word-formation exercises are especially hard for students with a poor mastery of English. To successfully complete them, it is necessary to have some “feel” for the language. In pre-reform days, students who struggled with the language could learn grammatical structures or vocabulary by heart. Nowadays, this is not possible anymore which also poses some pressure on the teachers. You cannot teach each and every phrasal verb in English, but in the centralised exam virtually any phrasal verb might be tested. It is absolutely essential to include as many language in use exercises in the teaching of English as possible. These do not always have to be in the standard format of the Matura but they need to challenge the students to expand their knowledge of English words and usage of grammar. Moreover, students need to be familiar with the test formats. When completing LIU exercises, it is advisable not to look at the possible answers when doing the exercises the first time round. In a first reading, students should come up with their own solutions and only in a second step choose from the given answer the one that is closest to their own solution.

1.2.1.3.1 Vocabulary Vocabulary is an integral part of the Language in Use exercises. Without the knowledge of words, no learner of a second language will be able to read, to write, to understand or to speak.

Research in the area of vocabulary learning started in the 1930s with Ogden and Richard’s word list of basic English. They assembled a list of 850 words that should allow L2 beginners to get 16 their meaning across in English. In 1953 West published his General Service List. His and following work concentrated on a) the frequency of each word in written English and b) the relative prominences of various meanings and uses of a word form. Although throughout 1945- 1970s vocabulary learning and teaching was not seen as one of the primary goals of L2 acquisition, it is now undisputable that it has a fixed place in any teaching and learning process. Many learners experience that their problems in receptive and productive language use are the result of inadequate vocabulary knowledge. Researchers in the field of pedagogy do not agree how people learn vocabulary. Different researchers have also had a different focus on vocabulary learning strategies. Vocabulary learning can take place in a direct or an indirect form. Direct vocabulary learning exercises include for example word-building exercises, guessing words from context, learning words in lists or vocabulary games (Nation 2). When learning vocabulary indirectly (c.f. Krashen’s input theory), the attention of the learner is focused on the message of a speaker or writer.

Thus, there exist many factors in the literature which influence vocabulary acquisition. Among these are (Takac 2008): - linguistic features of lexical items: How is a word defined? - the influence of first and other languages: What is the degree of equivalency between languages? - the role of memory: What role does memory play in the vocabulary acquisition process? - the organisation and development of the second language mental lexicon: How do people store new words? - individual learner differences: What learning strategies do certain learners apply? - exposure to linguistic input: Do the learners have enough linguistic input in order to be able to acquire new words? - the role of the teacher and vocabulary teaching strategies: What do teachers do to help their learners learn? - the role of vocabulary learning strategies: How much effort do the learners invest to learn new vocabulary?

Knowledge of a word encompasses the receptive and the productive knowledge. Receptive knowledge means to recognise the sound of a word and what it looks like. This involves the form, the position, the function, the meaning and associations of a word. Productive knowledge

17 goes even further. To produce a word a learner needs to know how to pronounce it, how to spell and write it and how to use its correct grammatical form. Usually the receptive vocabulary of a person is much larger than the productive one.

What makes LIU exercises so challenging for the students is the fact that all the different aspects or categories of words are tested. Among the tested ones are, for example, word classes, word families, word formation, multi-word units or collocations. There are, according to Thornbury, eight different word classes: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and determiners (Vocabulary 3). Within a cloze exercise, students are given a base word and have to fill in the appropriate word class to fit the context. Word families are words that share the same base or root but appear in a text with different endings. Students have to decide in the LIU test which form of the word is correct in a specific context. An important part of the test comprises word formation (e.g. compounding, blending, conversion, clipping), multi-word units (e.g. idioms) as well as collocations. It is rather difficult for students to learn new words. In traditional language lessons they had to learn word lists. For tests they needed to reproduce the word and write down the translation of it. Nowadays, it is also important that they know how a word “behaves” in context. To know a word does not only mean to know what its translation is. Thornbury states that to know a word involves, among other factors, the spoken form, the meaning, the word’s frequency, the connotations of the word, the register of the word, its collocations as well as its grammatical behaviour (Vocabulary 16). His implications for the teaching of vocabulary are that learners need tasks and strategies to help them organise their mental lexicon by building networks of associations. Teachers need to accept that the learning of new words involves a period of “initial fuzziness”. Learners need to wean themselves off a reliance on direct translation from their mother tongue. Words need to be presented in their typical contexts, so that learners get a feel for their meaning, their register, their collocations, and their syntactic environments. Furthermore, learners need multiple exposures to words. What speaks most in favour of showing films in order to teach vocabulary is the fact that not all the vocabulary can be taught. Learners need exposure to talk and text as well as training for self-directed learning (Vocabulary 30).

1.2.1.3.2 Grammar Undoubtedly, grammar plays a very important role in language teaching. The place of grammar within the teaching process has changed quite a few times over the centuries from being at the heart of teaching, to playing just a minor role. It cannot be denied that it is important to know 18 how words can be combined in sentences when we want to be able to speak a new language. Traditionally, grammar books break down the language into its different systems. Students are then required to learn these systems. Most learners are not very keen on learning grammar explicitly. Grammar, however is “the process by which language is organized and patterned in order to make meaning” (Thornbury, Grammar 6). This involves knowledge about the sentence (how are words ordered in a sentence), the syntax (how words are organised into sentences), about morphology (how words relate to one another) but also about word patterns. Furthermore, grammar looks beyond words and sentences and is concerned with how sentences are connected to form a coherent and cohesive text.

Grammar has traditionally been the centre of every curriculum. Teachers were of the opinion that a language consists mainly of grammar and without it a foreign language could not be learnt. This view has changed in the last years. The teaching of grammar and language learning theories are strongly interconnected. Some theories state that languages are learnt through deliberate study, whereas others view language learning as the subconscious absorption or the target language. Stern is of the opinion that no single view but a combination of the two should be applied in a teaching programme (128). Grammar used to be taught as segmented items. Students learnt how to form the Present Perfect Tense or when and how to use the Gerund. An alternative way of teaching language and its grammar is through topics, situations, notions and functions. Larger segments of language can be introduced through a specific topic or situation. These topics or situations are then always embedded into a communicative event and are more difficult to convey than traditional grammatical structures. Students are confronted with a whole discourse using often long and complicated language constructs. The advantage is that the learners become familiar with a relevant communicative event instead of isolated language chunks. There are occasions, though, were teachers deem it necessary to teach single grammatical features. Stern notes that “learners need practice not only in contextualizing but also in decontextualising, that is, they need to be able to abstract a formal element from its context” (145). Therefore, there is nothing bad in presenting a grammatical feature also in isolation in order for the learners to recognise what exactly they have to deal with. What every tutor should bear in mind is that grammar is not an end in itself but functions as a bridge towards successful communication.

For the Matura, students do not need to complete traditional grammar exercises where one single grammar unit (e.g. reported speech) has to be mastered. Theoretically, the learning of

19 grammar should be finished when students begin the upper form of an AHS. However, certain gaps within the language in use exercises test tenses, plural forms of nouns or phrasal verbs which means that students have to know all the grammar that has been taught in the lower form.

1.2.1.4 Text Writing Even though listening, reading and language in use are subsumed under the written part, students are also required to write two texts – an essay (for future exams also other text types could be used for the long text) of 400 words and a shorter text (report, article, blog entry or blog comment or email) of 250 words. Thereby it is important, that students can distinguish between formal and informal language, show a wide range of vocabulary and complex structures and can voice their opinion convincingly. Furthermore, they should have excellent control of structure, spelling and use linking devices accurately.

Writing, like all the other skills involved in teaching and learning, has undergone tremendous changes over the years. Nowadays, it is not considered as secondary to speaking but as a dynamic and creative way to further enhance the communicative competence of the L2 learner. For the writing tasks, students are expected to be able to master a set of text types which they practise in the entire upper form. Text types that are tested can be an essay, an article, a report, a blog entry/comment and an email. It is thereby extremely important that students are aware of the target audience and adapt their writing style accordingly. Each text type has defined characteristics that students must adhere to. Apart from stylistic devices (e.g. paragraphs, title, etc.), each text serves a specific purpose. The writing tasks always follow a strict pattern. Students get a context and three bullet points that have to be addressed within the text. The assessment process looks at four criteria: task achievement, organisation and layout, lexical and structural range as well as lexical and structural accuracy. For the task achievement the teacher has to assess whether the requirements of the stet task type is fully observed, and whether all three content points are addressed and fully developed. Relevant supporting details and examples must be provided. Furthermore, different ideas or facts need to be evaluated or advantages and disadvantages explained. Organisation and layout looks at the overall structure at the text level: are paragraphs used, are points developed in a clear and systematic way, are relationships between ideas marked and is there a variety of linking devices used? For the lexical and structural range, the students have to prove that they can express themselves clearly without having to restrict themselves. They have to use a very good variety of complex structures as well as a variety of vocabulary suitable for the respective task. The required 20 register appropriate for the task has to be used. Lexical and structural accuracy assesses the structural control, the control of spelling, the word choice as well as the punctuation5.

1.2.1.4.1 The essay The essay should be written in approximately 400 words. Students should convince or inform readers and identify a certain problem. It is important to come up with pro and con arguments and support them convincingly, and to follow a strict composition structure. The introduction refers to the topic and informs about the task. In the main part, students have to develop ideas in relation to their main argument. Every argument needs to be backed with relevant and suitable examples. The reader should not be addressed directly, and the style should be neutral or formal.

1.2.1.4.2 The article The article is an autonomous text around a specific topic within a book or a publication like a journal or a newspaper. It should inform, convince or entertain the readers. What is essential is the beginning of the article. It should gather the attention of the readers and motivate them to read on. There needs to be a conclusion or summary at the end. The style should be formal, neutral or even personal depending on the potential readership.

1.2.1.4.3 The report Students need to write about facts, projects, research, events, etc. and can include concluding advice. The target audience are policy makers (e.g. an institution or the headmaster). The writing of a report has to follow very strict guidelines. There has to be the name of the author, the subject, the date and every paragraph needs a separate heading. Given the target audience, the style is formal or neutral and very factual.

1.2.1.4.4 The blog Even though many students spend a lot of time in the internet, they struggle with the task of writing a blog entry or a blog comment. What they need to do is to express their opinion, inform, report about an event, or rather comment and react to a given blog entry. In any case the target

5 Bundesministerium für Bildung. Assessment Scale B2, https://www.srdp.at/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/Begleitmaterial/06_LFS/srdp-lfs-assessment-scale-b2.pdf (31.3.2018). 21 audience are friends, peers or just people who share the same interests. Therefore, the style is in most cases either neutral or personal. It could well be that students find it hard to write a blog entry or comment because it is a bit unnatural to write a digital format with paper and pen.

1.2.1.4.5 The email Students need to prove that they are able to compose an email. It can be a private email to a friend or specific emails in the business world. These can be emails of complaint or emails of application. The mail is written with pen on paper but the formal criteria of emails must be followed (e.g. subject line, address, date). Although the email has largely replaced the letter, students still need to show that they can stick to the elements of a formal letter. They have to address people correctly and also find a suitable greeting or farewell at the end. Depending on the purpose of the email, students need to include certain standard phrases one would find in, for example, an email of complaint. The style has to be appropriate to the respective mail6.

1.3 The oral part

1.3.1 Skills tested in the oral Matura The oral exam of the English Matura consists of two parts. In the first part students have to deliver a short speech in form of a monologue. They have preparation time and need to talk for approximately five minutes without any interruption of the teacher. To begin, in most cases, are two pictures which have to be compared and contrasted. The two other assignments are derived from the pictures. The students need to demonstrate that they are able to talk about a specific topic. The second part is a dialogue either between two students or between the student and the teacher and lasts for about ten minutes.

As listening almost always occurs in conversation, students need to be able to speak too, so they will alternately be listener and speaker. Teaching listening is therefore closely related to teaching speaking. In real-life situations listening does not occur without speaking. Normally, people are engaged in a dialogue in which they alternately take on the role of the listener and the speaker. It is the main goal of teaching to prepare learners to use the language in real-speech. In order to be able to say something in a foreign language one needs to have knowledge about the grammar and the verbs but there is a difference between knowledge of a language (grammar

6 Übersicht Textsortencharakteristika Textsorten lebende Fremdsprachen, Bundesministerium für Bildung, 2017, https://www.srdp.at/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/Begleitmaterial/06_LFS/Konzepte- Modelle/srdp_lfs_textsortencharakteristika_2017-10-19.pdf (31.3.2018). 22 and vocabulary) and use of a language (making rapid decisions, implementing them, adjusting our conversation to unexpected problems). Learners may theoretically know a lot about a language but are not able to use it in speech. Whereas knowledge and skill can be understood and memorised, only a skill can be imitated and practiced. Therefore, these two different areas require different pedagogical actions.

There is also a huge difference between written and spoken language concerning the size and shape of sentences or the time constraints in expressing oneself. The speaker needs to possess pragmatic knowledge in order to understand and make him/herself understood. What can be subsumed under pragmatics of speaking is turn-taking. Turn-taking concerns the question of how a speaker knows that it is appropriate to change from listener to speaker without interrupting or being too late to speak. There are various linguistic and non-linguistic factors involved. Even though it is quite difficult to teach, it is expected that students are familiar with the rules of turn-taking during their oral exam. Hughes notes, however, that teachers need to be realistic in their goals for the L2 learners in terms of their goals concerning turn-taking (229- 230). Learners should become aware that turn-taking can significantly affect the impression they give to other people as to their level of interest and engagement in the discourse. Learners should gain a sense of the complexity of naturally occurring talk and should be able to find and understand the points in utterances when they can appropriately break in on the conversation. It is important that learners are able to build their personal interactive speaking-style. When it comes to teaching speaking, there are at least two different positions. One states that there has to be progressive development. Only after the learners have mastered the grammar, phonology and lexicon of a language can they start to speak. The other position believes that there should be immediate communication. Learners should start using the language from the first possible contact with it.

As a basis for their preparation for the oral Matura, students get a list of topics they have to be familiar with. These topics are the ones that have been dealt with during the four years of the upper form of grammar school. For language level B2, the list looks like this (kompetenzorientierte Reifeprüfung 13): 1. Relationships and social networks 13. Art and culture 2. Living 14. Media 3. Clothing and fashion 15. Communication 4. Nutrition and health 16. Nature and ecology

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5. Sports (social and economic dimension) 17. New technologies 6. School and education 18. Personal future/plans 7. Work (transnational and global aspects) 19. Intercultural aspects 8. Leisure 20. Childhood/growing up 9. Consumer culture 21. Politics/political institutions 10. Tradition and change 22. Globalisation 11. Transport and tourism 23. Social groups (e.g. minorities) 12. Cultural/national aspects 24. Rules, law (personal freedom, youth crime)

There is a fixed structure for the speaking tasks of the Matura. As noted earlier, the first part is a monologue and its starting point are – in many cases – two pictures or graphics. The students draw two topics out of the 24 topics and can decide on one. The monologue consists of three sub-tasks based formulated through function words. The first task is in most cases to compare and contrast two pictures that lead into the chosen topic. After having compared and contrasted these pictures, the students have to speak about two more bullet points that are mentioned in the rubric. The subsequent bullet points are formulated according to specific function words or operators. Students need to prove that they are able to do something with the given topic. They need, for example, to compare, contrast, summarise, explain, discuss, illustrate, interpret, evaluate, find arguments or evaluate.

The second task, the dialogue, has to state a clear context but must not be a role play. If possible, the context should be chosen to resemble a situation that the student might find him/herself in real-life. Together with their speaking partner, students need to come to a clear result or conclusion. There need to be five sub- topics or arguments that students evaluate and find arguments for and against. For this task it is essential that students stick to conventions of authentic speech (e.g. turn-taking, alterations, reformulations, etc.). Similar to correcting written texts, speakers also have to use alterations. Speakers correct themselves and rephrase or reformulate what they say. These strategies help to reduce memory capacity and to reduce the pre-planning of speech. It is essential that teachers are aware of the facilitation and compensation strategies that occur in natural speech. It does not need to be necessary for the learners to always answer in full sentences or to carefully plan what they want to say. In contrast to writing, speakers have only little time to plan, organise and execute their message. Therefore, speakers facilitate and compensate when speaking. Bygate lists four ways of facilitation: simplifying (speakers use less complex syntax), ellipsis (abbreviation of messages and incomplete sentences or clauses), use of formulaic expressions and use of fillers and hesitation

24 devices (15). The teachers should assess whether students apply such strategies when doing the dialogue.

As is the case for the written texts, also for the spoken performance the teachers have to assess the language of the students according to the four criteria: task achievement, fluency and interaction, range of spoken language and accuracy of spoken language. For the task achievement students have to address all aspects of the task and expand them convincingly. They have to develop their descriptions very clear and systematically and sustain their opinions convincingly. Fluency and interaction concerns a degree of fluency and spontaneity. Students should be able to easily adjust to the level of formality. They need to express themselves consistently in longer complex stretches of speech. The range of spoken language assesses whether the students are able to express themselves clearly and without restrictions. They must have a wide range of vocabulary suitable for the respective task and use a range of complex structures. Teachers test whether the students need to use circumlocution or paraphrase or have a good command of topic-specific vocabulary. The criterion of accuracy of spoken language encompasses lexical accuracy. Students need to demonstrate that they have hardly any incorrect word choice and a very good grammatical control. There should be hardly any lexical or grammatical slips. Intonation should be used appropriately to highlight significant points.

1.3.1.1 Pronunciation Learning a new language does not only mean to be able to master e.g. the vocabulary and the grammar, but the sound system as well. Pronunciation is a vast field that consists of speech sounds, rules that connect these sounds, word- and sentence stress, rhythm and intonation. Given these many elements it makes sense to teach them explicitly. For different nationalities, various sounds and stress patterns are problematic because they do not exist or are very different in their mother tongues. If pronunciation is not good in a foreign language, it can even hinder communication.

Hewings describes that in British English around 44 phonemes (20 vowels and 24 consonants) are generally recognised, but different languages use different ones (3). Many of the pronunciation problems faced by learners of English relate to differences in the phonemes used in the first and second language. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that English distinguishes between vowel and consonant letters and vowel and consonant sounds.

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Other features of English that can cause pronunciation problems are: consonant clusters (it is not very common in major languages to have, like in English, more than two consonant clusters), stress shift (depending on the context the stress of a word may change), connected speech (due to the speed of speaking, pronunciation changes take place in connected speech, e.g. sounds change, are missed out or extra sounds are inserted), strong and weak forms (many words in English have a strong and a weak form which is not the case for other languages) and pronunciation and spelling (learners of English will be confused as the relationship between spelling and pronunciation is quite complex) (Hewings 3-10). The variation of English that is taught in Austrian grammar schools is British English. It is, however, no problem if students have or try to imitate an American accent. The important point is to be consistent when speaking English.

1.3.1.2 Pragmatics Pragmatics is concerned with the sociocultural aspects of learning a language and closely related to grammar: How to find the right words when wanting to apologise, make requests or be polite in a foreign language? Pragmatics is part of theories of second language acquisition and a subfield of the construct of communicative competence. Canale notes that communicative competence has several components. It consists of grammatical competence (mastery of the verbal and non-verbal language code), sociolinguistic competence (sociocultural rules of use and rules of discourse), discourse competence (mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text) and strategic competence (mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies) (3-4). What makes linguistic life even more complicated is the fact that different categories of pragmatics, like Cross-Cultural Pragmatics (CCP), Intercultural Pragmatics (ICP), Contrastive Pragmatics (CoP) and Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) are used.

Thomas presents a view of pragmatics as, “meaning in interaction” (23). This view takes account of the various contributions of the speaker and the hearer as well as of utterance and context. She starts her explanation of pragmatics with the sentence, “People do not always or even usually say what they mean” (1). It is the difficulty for the foreign speaker to understand the words that are spoken and interpret them in the right way. Kasper and Rose define pragmatics as, “the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context” (2). Pragmatics is concerned with questions like: which strategies learners use for communication, how they effectively use langue and the social perceptions underlying communicative action. It is not 26 easy for L2 learners to find the right words when wanting to apologise, make requests or be polite. Kasper and Rose state that whereas there is a large body of research in the area of second language pragmatic use, there is only scarce literature around the development of second language pragmatics (1).

There are many linguistic ways in which native speakers realise the appropriate speech acts but is it also possible for language learners to grasp the sometimes only subtle differences between the semantic options? When it comes to language courses, the question arises whether it is possible to teach pragmatics. Is it possible, as Bardovi-Harlig puts it, to teach the “secret rules” of a language (13)? Native speakers and non-native speakers of a language most often differ in their use of speech acts. According to Bardovi-Harlig the difference lies in the choice of speech acts (different speech acts or no speech acts at all), in the choice of semantic formulas (the type of information given), in content (the specific information given by a speaker) and in the form of a speech act. The explanation for pragmatic differences between native speakers and non- native speakers are: availability of input, influence of instruction, proficiency, length of exposure and influence of first language and culture (13).

Bachman and Palmer state that through pragmatic knowledge we can relate utterances or sentences and texts to their meanings, to the intentions of language users, and to relevant characteristics of the language use setting (69). They distinguish between functional and sociolinguistic knowledge. Functional knowledge enables us to interpret the relationships between spoken or written language with the intentions of the speaker or writer. Sociolinguistic knowledge means that we are able to decide what kind of language utterances are appropriate for particular language settings. Leech divided the general field of pragmatics into pragmalinguistics (the study of the more linguistic end of pragmatics) and socio-pragmatics (the sociological interface of pragmatics) (10-11).

The main question within the field, is whether it is possible to teach and consciously learn pragmatics of a second language. In their study of instruction and feedback in the development of pragmatic competence, Koike and Pearson (2005) come to the conclusion that learners develop pragmatic competence more effectively when they experience instruction on the speech act and responses before doing exercises. There is, however, a difference of effect according to the type of task and the explicitness of instruction and feedback. They found that explicit instruction and feedback help learners understand pragmatic elements and contexts by calling

27 their attention to pragmatic form. Pragmatics is not concerned with the formal aspects of language but with the question how learners apply formal aspects of the L2 in actual communication. Little is still known how learners acquire rules of speaking. From the studies that have been conducted so far, three factors emerge which are important in the acquisition of pragmatic competence: (1) the level of the learner’s linguistic competence (How well do learners need to have acquired the formal aspects of the L2 in order to perform pragmatic competence?) (2) transfer (How many rules of speaking to learners transfer from their L1 to the L2?) and (3) the status of the learner (What status does the learner have in relation to the communication partner?) (Ellis 197).

There are studies (e.g. Bouton 1994) that indicate that learners who receive pragmatic instructions are better than learners who do not. Bouton points out that learners can acquire some, perhaps many, features of pragmatics without instruction when they live in an environment which affords ample opportunity for exposure to and use of the target language (397). This means that “instruction is not necessary for each and every pragmatic learning object in the sense that it cannot be learnt without instruction.” As it is seldom possible that grammar school students live in an English-speaking country, film is a very good means to teach them pragmatics – in many cases even unconsciously. By watching an English-speaking film, they are exposed to many linguistic features that would be very hard to teach. What is more, teachers could use film sequences to highlight pragmatic features and to make them more concrete.

1.3.1.3 Culture When learning a language it is not enough to master the grammar, vocabulary and phonology, it is equally important to grasp the cultural differences and similarities between one’s native tongue and the L2. But what exactly do we understand by “culture”? Agar notes that “culture happens when you learn to use a second language” and that “culture starts when you realize that you’ve got a problem with language, and the problem has to do with who you are” (209. These are very valid and useful definitions. When students learn a language within the confines of a classroom they mostly struggle with the grammar or pronunciation of a new language. Only when they use this newly learnt language in conversation with people in real-life situations, do they realise that language cannot be used without some cultural understanding (at least if you want to avoid misunderstanding).

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Andersen et al. state that “the view of culture is changing from the traditional or classical view of culture as synonymous with art and literature (…) into a view that includes the various ways of life of the members of the target language community within or across national borders” (8). In a language teaching context it is interesting and necessary to deal with culture. Students need to know how native speakers use their language for communicative purposes but also how they behave, eat, talk, live and what their customs, beliefs, values and peculiarities are. Although it is very important to integrate culture, it is also a huge challenge. Ronowicz and Yallop note that “elementary and intermediate learners do not have enough proficiency in the language either to notice such nuances even if they are exposed to them or to apply such knowledge consistently while they are struggling with the language itself” (2-3). Therefore, it is important to at least give them an understanding of some elements of English culture that they will encounter in their daily lives. In order to become aware of cultural differences, Ronowicz and Yallop propose to contrast one’s mother tongue to the second language (45). Students should ask themselves what they would do and say in various situations both in their own country and in England. This contrasting is known under the term intercultural differences.

Culture is in close relation to attitude. If the learners have a positive attitude toward the target language culture they are also more successful in learning the language than those who have a negative attitude toward the target language culture. Brown states that “A language is a part of a culture, and a culture is a part of a language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture” (177). Even though culture seems to be as important as language itself, it has long not been treated so. Lange and Paige speculate that there are three reasons for this: (1) Culture is complex and elusive, incorporating as it does elements such as attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, perceptions, ways of behaving and thinking, and values. These elements cannot be included in language programs in the linear and objective instructional formats that have traditionally been employed. (2) Many teachers say: “Culture is not language, so why should we have to deal with it and its complexities? It takes away from the needed focus on language and communication.” And (3) any discussion of cultural differences could cause language learners to change their own ways of thinking and behaving. In other words, culture takes the learning experience far beyond the realm of comfort, experience, and interest of both teacher and the learner” (177). When researchers started to deal with culture in language teaching in the 1970s, culture was seen as facts that could be taught and learnt. The individual could not create or participate in the creation of culture. Recent models see culture as a very flexible and variable construct which

29 is constantly shaped by the behaviours and different levels of attentions of the participants. Culture learning in this new perspective would include learning about the self as a cultural being; learning about culture and its impact on human communication, behaviour and identity; Culture-general learning; i.e., learning about universal, cross-cultural phenomena such as cultural adjustment; culture-specific learning, i.e., learning about a particular culture, including its language; and learning how to learn, e.g., becoming an effective language and culture learner.

Researchers do not agree on a common definition of “culture” and thus, it is quite difficult to state what concept should be integrated into language teaching. Culture is comprised of two dimensions – the Big C and the little c or, objective culture and subjective culture. What is meant by this is that culture can mean formal institutions, great figures of history, literature or arts on the one hand and aspects of our daily lives, like housing, clothing, food, tools, transportation, shopping, etc. on the other hand. Learners are thus faced with a twofold challenge: in addition to the second language they also need to acquire the culture or more precisely they need to develop an intercultural competence. This can very well be done through watching movies of the target culture. Cultural as well as intercultural features become apparent and are experienced consciously as well as unconsciously.

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2 Film in the Austrian Curriculum for English Teachers of English have to follow the Austrian curriculum as well as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The new competence-based curriculum for English has been in force since September 2017. It has various explicit references to using film in the language classroom of the upper form of a Gymnasium (grammar school). Under didactic principles there is the subheading Förderung authentischer Begegnungen which states that teachers should use audio-visual media as well as new technology. One of the Bildungs- und Lehraufgabe in classes five to eight states that it is absolutely essential to foster awareness for different cultures and ways of life. The most important and critical subheading for using film in the language lessons is found under Vielfalt von Lehrmethoden, Arbeitsformen und Lernstrategien. It reads, “Für die Aktualität und angemessene Authentizität der Lehr- und Lernmaterialien ist laufend zu sorgen. Außerdem ist auf den Einsatz von authentischem Textmaterial zu achten.“

Apart from the Austrian curriculum for English language teaching, teachers also have to respect the CEFR. The CEFR provides a common basis from the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, etc. across Europe. It describes in a comprehensive way what language learners have to learn to do in order to use a language for communication and what knowledge and skills they have to develop so as to be able to act effectively.7

In September 2017 the CEFR was updated and expanded. The provisional edition includes a companion volume with new descriptors. Under the heading Audio-visual Reception these new descriptors encompass watching TV, film and video. Level B2 states that students “can understand documentaries, live interviews, talk shows, plays and the majority of films in the standard form of the language” (65). Furthermore, students should be able to write a review of a film, book or play (creative writing 75) and are able to summarise and comment (in Language B) on the plot and sequence of events in a film or play (in Language A) (processing text in speech 107)

Naturally, teachers cannot expect students to understand all kinds of audio-visual formats and write refined reviews. There needs to be a learning process, and this is why the CEFR takes

7 “Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment”. Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 1. 31 into account that watching TV and film should already start at level A2. Whereas in the original version of the CEFR there was no descriptor for the beginner level, it is now added in the most recent version. Film has got much better recognition due to more and more teachers using audio- visual formats in language teaching. From the CEFR descriptors it becomes obvious that on the beginner level, students are offered new and advertisements and should just recognise familiar words and phrases and identify topics. Gradually the clips get longer and after four years of English teaching, students should be able to follow a scene from a film. The CEFR descriptors for watching TV, film and video looks like this. As the C-levels are not relevant for the Austrian Matura, they are not shown here.

B2 Can understand most TV news and current affairs programmes. Can understand documentaries, live interviews, talk shows, plays and the majority of films in the standard form of the language. B1 Can understand a large part of many TV programmes on topics of personal interest such as interviews, short lectures, and news reports when the delivery is relatively slow and clear. Can follow many films in which visuals and action carry much of the storyline, and which are delivered clearly in straightforward language. Can catch the main points in TV programmes on familiar topics when the delivery is relatively slow and clear. A2 Can identify the main point of TV news items reporting events, accidents etc. where the visual supports the commentary. Can follow a TV commercial or a trailer for or scene from a film, understanding what the actors are talking about, provided that the images are a great help in understanding and the delivery is clear and relatively slow. Can follow changes of topic of factual TV news items, and form an idea of the main content. A1 Can recognise familiar words and phrases and identify the topics in headline news summaries and many of the products in advertisements, by exploiting visual information and general knowledge.

2.1 Why teachers should show films As most English teachers try very hard to offer their students a broad variety of teaching and learning resources, film has found its way into English lessons. Movies manage to improve the motivation of the learners and are a welcome change in the daily routine of learning. Nowadays, teachers use YouTube clips, movie trailers or movies to teach English. Films were introduced into English teaching on a broad scale in the 1980s in form of VHS videotapes. At that time there were “commercially available video serials, explicitly designed for ESL/EFL” classrooms. Such educational videos, however, failed within a “relatively short time span…to sustain student interest” (King 509). Such videos often lacked authenticity as texts were spoken slower than usual and the topics were not really interesting for the students.

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Most English teachers want to provide their students with the best possible lessons. As the majority of the English teachers in Austria are not native speakers, they need to be creative and innovative in order to immerse the learners as much as possible in the English language. One way of doing this is showing English movies. Algeo notes that “film has the ability to virtually transport a classroom of students to a distant place for the space of several hours” and manages to “vividly convey a sense of place or the essence of a culture” (133). Since the emergence of communicative language teaching theories in the 1980s and 1990s, videos/films have become a valuable source for language teachers. Films are, among others, a means to integrate authenticity into the classrooms while at the same time manage to teach the students intercultural knowledge, the target language as well as its culture. Showing a film means providing an authentic context and discourse in the target language. What is more, “learning through film compensates for many of the shortcomings in the EFL learning experience by bringing language to life” (King 510). The added bonus and a very strong argument for showing films in the language classroom is the increased motivation of students (Bal-Gezegin 451). The authenticity, however, has its limitations because “a film is not a real-life situation where students can stop the people and ask questions” (Hennessey 116). In order for the students to understand what the characters are talking about, it is necessary to inform them about the plot, the characters, the culture as well as the language they will encounter. Certain idioms or expressions used in the film should be pre-taught so that the students remain motivated.

Cruse notes that there are “three primary modalities through which people take in information: visual, auditory and tactile” (5). From this derive the three basic learning styles visual-spatial, auditory-sequential and tactile-kinaesthetic. Even though it is quite apparent that visual- oriented learners benefit from films, the other learner types have additional benefit from watching films, too. Auditory learners have the added bonus of sound and speech and tactile learners can benefit from demonstrations which would otherwise not be possible in a classroom (Cruse 5). Contrary to a traditional teacher-centred approach, film manages to always simultaneously provide sound and image. What is more, through films students have the chance to listen to authentic conversations and get accustomed to hearing different accents.

In traditional classrooms students need to actively participate in the lesson and in order to further practise what they have learned, they have to do some homework. In many cases this consists of writing tasks or learning new words. It would, however, also be possible to tell them to watch films or TV series as homework. In order for such an alternative homework to be most

33 effective, the students must be familiar with the film medium and what it can teach them. Therefore it is essential that teachers show films in English lessons and teach the “students how they can learn and practise English when watching movies in their own time” (Goctu 121). Unfortunately, motivated teachers who use films in order to enhance the students’ skills often need to defend themselves because in some instances films have been used as time-fillers or just to keep students quiet. King notes that “teachers feel obliged to make the most of learning opportunities through films in order to justify their use in the classroom” (511). What is more, not every teacher uses appropriate films for the classroom or sometimes use movies “for reasons that are not directly related to knowledge acquisition or skills development” (Hobbs 35). In order to avoid such practices and to help teachers choose the right films, various resources have been published8. Furthermore, it is always essential to choose films that engage students and are interesting for them. “Choosing a film that strongly fits within the experience of the students and has relevancy for their lives, creates a dynamic environment in which the students think about the film critically, express their opinions orally, and write profusely” (Vetrie 42-43).

Roell summarised some of the main reasons why teachers should include movies in their English lessons: - Films combine pleasure and learning by telling a story in a way that captures and holds the viewer’s interest. - Films simultaneously address different senses and cognitive channels. For example, spoken language is supported by visual elements that make it easier for students to understand the dialogues and the plot. - Students are exposed to the way people actually speak. - Films involve the viewers, appeal to their feelings, and help them empathizes with the protagonists. - DVDs usually come with subtitles in English, which facilitates understanding and improves reading skills. (1)

In quite a similar way, Sherman (2-3) answers the question of what film is good for by providing different answers. Film should be shown for its own sake. Thanks to the internet, we have access to a seemingly endless amount of English-language media (e.g. news, advertisements, films, etc.). This is why we need to equip the students with the skills to access all these different

8 e.g. Bradley, Martin. Teaching with Film. Bring the world into your classroom. Vienna, 2013. 34 media. Furthermore, authentic audio-visual materials provide a vast up-to-date linguistic resource of accents, vocabulary, grammar, syntax as well as all kinds of discourse in different contexts which also depict cultural elements. Viewers see how people in films live, think and behave. What is more, films or video clips can always be the starting point of lively discussions. Furthermore, showing films in English lessons means giving the students access to a moving picture book which brings the English-language world to the learner.

In a nutshell, Goldstein and Driver sum up the four key arguments for film use in the language classroom. According to them, there needs to be a language focus where recently introduced language items (e.g. grammar structures, vocabulary, etc.) are experienced in context. The visual side of the film is thereby only secondary to the audio. Moreover, there needs to be skills practice when showing videos in class. All the four skills (to a lesser extent reading and writing) should be practised. Films should also serve as stimuli to engage interest and for follow-up activities. Finally, the moving image serves as a resource that provides the learners with information about the culture of the target country (3). Last but not least, films contribute largely to the acquisition of skills needed in the Austrian Matura. Students are required to show that they master listening, reading, writing and speaking skills and have knowledge about cultural aspects as well. Given the scarce amount of English lessons in the upper forms of an AHS (about 3 lessons per week), it is quite a challenge to teach all these skills. This is why I argue, that film has the capacity to enrich and enhance the traditional teaching and to contribute to the acquisition of those skills that are needed in order to pass the Matura in English successfully. “The combination of both image and sound significantly aids in the achievement of the pedagogical goals of reading, writing, listening and speaking English” (Whatley 50). The following subchapters describe the individual skills that films can teach in more detail.

2.1.1 Formal and Informal Language/Colloquial language Students who take their Matura are expected to distinguish between different registers and express themselves in formal and informal language. These language skills are mostly assessed through writing tasks (e.g. writing a formal email, writing a blog entry or writing an email to a friend, etc.). In traditional lessons colloquial language can be taught by contrasting colloquial expressions with formal ones or, for example, by listening to colloquial conversations. Such conversations are in most cases difficult to find in traditional textbooks. This is a reason why it makes sense to include popular films in English teaching. As Goctu notes by watching movies

35 students improve not only the acquisition of words but “also variety of vocabulary and colloquial expressions, phrasal verbs, verb phrases” (123).

2.1.2 Culture For the Matura, teachers need to assess whether the students have some knowledge about British culture. To teach culture in an English lesson, however, is not so easily achieved. Popular films lend themselves perfectly to this task and are in most cases the students’ “initial contact with English-speaking culture” (Khan 47). Depending on the film, of course, students can be immersed into the British culture. Apart from films, also TV series are a great means of conveying typical cultural features. When watching British (or in general English speaking) movies, students are exposed to “natural (seeming) discourse, accents and dialects, slang and colloquialisms, body and gesticulatory language and lastly, cultural customs” (Brown 45).

Naturally, the best way to learn the culture of a country is to spend a certain amount of time there. As this is not possible for all learners of English “teaching English through movies is one of the better methods for cultural transference” (Brown 54). Generally speaking, a film is “a cultural artefact as worthy of study in foreign language classrooms as canonical texts of literature” (Kaiser 233). There has long been the belief that films are secondary to literature because they are not of the same high standard as the written texts. Fortunately, this view has changed over the last years. Whereas some decades ago people were considered academic when they could cite lines from literature, nowadays quotes from popular films have found their way into our everyday speech (e.g. “I’ll be back” from Terminator).

Showing films can by no means substitute for actual interaction with members of other cultures. However, they have the capacity to provide useful preparation for those encounters by fostering understanding and developing sensitivity (Roell 2). Furthermore, films can be used to offer students systems of orientation between different cultures. They experience their own culture in relation to the one presented in the film. Students, however, have to be made aware of the cultural depictions in films. Culture is not only celebrations and people of different nationalities, but it is also the gestures, the reactions within conversations, food or clothes that are shown. From these features students are able to deduce cultural elements that are different from one’s own. In addition, and this is very important for the Matura, students experience social habits as well as the semantics and pragmatics of speech used in the film. Intercultural understanding (or variants of this title) is part of the pool of topics students have to master for the oral part of the 36

Matura. However, culture can be found in nearly every listening, writing or language in use task as well. Students need to support their ideas and give reasons for or against their point of view. They have to be able to make sense of pictures they have to analyse which depict – in most cases – cultural features of English speaking countries.

2.1.3 Grammar Traditionally, grammar has always had an important place in language teaching and testing. However, the importance of grammar has declined. With the communicative teaching approach, it has become more important that the students are able to express themselves. Naturally, when taking a school-leaving exam it is still important to write a text grammatically correctly and to speak according to the grammar rules. However, grammar is only one fourth of the overall mark. The days are gone when teachers counted mistakes and gave a grade according to the number of mistakes. As grammar learning is in most cases a daunting activity for students, it makes sense to practise grammar by watching films. Grammar items, like for example phrasal verbs or tenses, are more fun when being analysed in a film transcript. At the same time, students always experience grammar in an authentic context.

2.1.4 Speaking - Vocabulary Teaching English means equipping the learners with the skills needed in order to be able to master a conversation in the foreign language. Whereas until about the 1980 English lessons consisted first and foremost of grammar and endless vocabulary lists which had to be learnt by heart, nowadays the focus is on the oral skills of the students. In order to reach a certain level of fluency, teachers have to apply a lot of strategies, scaffolds and activities. Learning new words is very tedious for students and an activity they do not really like. However, without words they are not able to express themselves. Nowadays, teachers try very hard to make learning words as pleasurable as possibly by using different methods and activities. At the end of the day, however, there is no way around sitting down and learning them. In most cases students need to rely on their teacher to know how a certain word is used and in which context it appears. If they are not a hundred percent sure what a word means and how it is used, they will not use it actively when speaking or writing themselves. Films provide a great means to experience words in a real-life context. Furthermore, they offer students the possibility to experience collocations in authentic contexts. Students might have learned a lot of words and phrases but applying them in actual speech is a totally different matter. By listening to word

37 families and collocations in authentic conversations they have the chance to deepen their understanding of certain words and phrases.

2.1.5 Speaking – Pronunciation and Intonation There are quite a few students who know a lot of words and can use them in writing but have problems pronouncing English words. One way of improving pronunciation and intonation is to expose the young people to as much English as possible. The Austrian curriculum and its teaching practise try to do just that by including listening activities right from the beginning. Students in their first year of English already listen to many recordings spoken by native speakers and need to do certain pre-, while, and/or post-reading activities. This is to ensure that they become accustomed to the pronunciation, intonation and speed of English. Taken into account that they are exposed to similar listening tasks for eight years, it is understandable that the motivation declines over the years. Using films instead of audio recordings once in a while helps to teach pronunciation and intonation and at the same time motivates the learners a lot more than just listening to yet another recording.

Chiu presents interesting findings from a movie dubbing project undertaken in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) conversation classes (24). Students were asked to dub the voices of muted characters in authentic film clips. First, the students watched the clip and paid special attention to the pronunciation and intonation of the words. As a final product they had to speak the voices of the characters while the film was muted. Chiu reports that the project was successful because the film dubbing provided “contextualised scenario for meaningful learning” and thus video dubbing projects are “an effective means to improving pronunciation and intonation in several ways” (25-26): Mispronunciation is reduced and the fluency of the students is improved. Learners become aware of the intonation of certain words as they also had to express emotions in the muted videos.

2.1.6 Listening In Austria (as in other countries) it is common use to include audio-recordings into language lessons from the first year. Students need to be accustomed to (nearly) authentic speech as well as various accents. The listening skills are regularly tested. Listening is also one of the four main parts of the Matura. For the final exam, students need to be able to understand three recordings of various degrees of difficulty. In most cases, background noises are included as well to make the listening experience more challenging and authentic. Whereas authenticity 38 plays a major role in language teaching, there seems to be no objections to a listening experience which will hardly take place in real-life. People usually talk to each other personally or over the phone, and when watching movies they listen to conversations in which they see the actors and their movements and gestures. Listening without seeing the person who speaks is therefore a really big challenge. Moreover, “film often incorporates a wide variety of sociolects of the target language” (Kaiser 233). While watching movies, students have the chance to listen to a lot of different people interacting, e.g. children or non-native speakers who might speak slang, jargon, rural or urban speech or various dialects. To watch different characters with different sociolects interact, makes it easier for the students to understand the varieties of speech. While listening, people tend to imagine the context (e.g. the people speaking, the location, the mood, etc.) and there is a certain danger that the students do not focus their attention to the spoken text a hundred percent. Another challenge can be the language of the film which might lead to comprehension problems. In some films the language has a high verbal density (e.g. a lot of speech with very little action) or words which do not match the action or are an ironic commentary on it (Sherman 15).

2.1.7 Reading At first glance the contribution of popular film on the skill of reading might not be apparent. Looking at it more closely, however, there can be contributions on different levels. One is found within Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory and the other in the simple fact of subtitles. Another one lies in the fact that skills cannot and should not be taught in isolation. “Reading, I have discovered, cannot be taught in isolation. Students who can listen, discuss and think are going to learn to read more effectively.” Vetrie even notes that “students who gain experience in listening, speaking, and writing through interaction with film begin to radically improve their reading and writing proficiency” (42). As soon as the students have acquired listening, discussion and thinking skills to name just a view, they also learn to read more effectively.

Donaghy states that in order to help students read printed text, it is essential to work with those texts that they are already reading. “Their ability to read moving image texts enhances their ability to read all kinds of texts, both in school and outside”. After all, print and moving image texts share many common textual strategies. They “tell stories, differentiate between fact and fiction, present characters, convey a sense of place and context and include generic features that help us to recognise certain types of stories” (16-17).

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2.1.8 Writing If teachers use the motivation of students for watching films, meaningful conversations, discussions and also writing sequences can be the result of having watched movies. Furthermore, learners improve their vocabulary and are emotionally challenged or touched. These emotions can lead to inspired writing processes. They need to use the foreign language in order to express themselves about a topic that is interesting for them. After all, engaging the students is one of the main goals teachers strive for. Films can serve as the starting point for critical-thinking as well as writing activities.

2.2 Challenges in showing films in school One major problem of showing films in the language classroom is the time factor. How is a 90- minute film best shown in a school context with lessons lasting for 45 to 50 minutes? If teachers show the films in three consecutive lessons, not only a lot of teaching time but also the whole flow of the plot is lost. It takes some time for the learners to get into the storyline again. The film is not perceived as a whole piece of text but rather three rather isolated snippets of texts whose analysis and interpretation might be difficult. What is more, in case a lesson does not take place (because of a bank holiday, an excursion, illness of the teacher, etc.) it might happen that the process of film-showing expands over two or three weeks. An alternative way would be to treat film exactly like a written text. Literature has always been part of English teaching. Works of literature, however, are not always read in their entirety in the lessons. This would take up too much time and would be tiresome for students and teachers alike. Therefore, a lot of reading has to take place at home. The same could be done with films. Many films are available on YouTube or teachers could provide them on the school’s learning platform. Thus, the assignment or homework for the students would be to watch certain scenes of the movie at home. The discussion and main activities would then be done within class.

If a teacher decides to show a movie in class, a way around the time problem would be to swap lessons with a colleague. This may sound easy in theory but is rather challenging in practice. Especially in the last two years of grammar school, teachers are under some pressure to teach everything that is necessary for the Matura. Lessons that are cancelled or do not take place at the planned time, could be a problem for some teachers. As for a substantial number of teachers, watching a movie does not rate as highly as teaching a traditional lesson, one needs to be really convincing to swap lessons for the aim of watching a film. Apart from the already listed

40 arguments, Thaler has summarised the conflicts which can occur when watching films in class (29) and has also come up with solutions for them:

Problems Solutions Time conflict: - Time-saving forms of presentation long film vs 45/50-minute lesson - Independent film study Language conflict: - No “having-to-understand- authentic material vs. learners’ level everything-attitude” - Film selection adapted to learners’ level - Simple plots - Slow, clear pronunciation - Repeated viewings - Pre-viewing activities - Few discrepancies between words and visuals Reception conflict: - Reflected combination of audio and visual vs. auditory channel (subtitled films: subtitles “The eye is more powerful than the ear”) - No exclusive use of subtitles - Tuning in (subtitles just for the first minutes) Goal conflict: - Balancing learning and enjoying Entertainment vs. learning - Restricted use of pause button - Avoiding over-analysis - Careful use of grammar/vocabulary exercises technology conflict: - Pre-service training requirements vs school - In-service tutorials equipment/teacher know-how - Private notebook

2.3 Approaches of using films in the language classroom The most basic question for an English teacher is always which movie to choose in order for the students to benefit from it. Kwon states that the choice of a film for an English class is “not necessarily intuitive, and personal preference may not be an adequate justification for the time and effort spent on studying a movie during class”. There needs to be a systematic approach to the selection of a film as well as selection criteria (3). Given the vast amount of films that are released every year, it is impossible for teachers to know every single one let alone evaluate whether they would be a good resource for teaching. Thus, it would make sense to have movie library in school that lists films which fit specific learning and teaching goals. In order for films to be worthy of being used in class, they need to be appropriate for the age, ethnic, cultural and religious background of the students (Kwon 5). Apart from the general criteria, it is of utmost 41 importance that a film that is used in an ESL context uses language that is appropriate for the learner level. Even though watching films within class might be highly motivating, excessive language demands on parts of the students will lead to a loss in interest and a rather passive watching practice. A film used in English teaching must use realistic styles of speech, have intelligible pronunciation as well as a proper scope of vocabulary and idiom. What is more, there should be a considerable percentage of speech and dialogue as well as relatively clean language with an acceptable amount of taboo or questionable words (Kwon 28).

Having passed the selection phase, it is always a challenge to fit a full-length movie into English lessons. Basically as mentioned above, there are two main approaches to showing films in English classrooms: the short-sequence approach and the whole-film approach (King 512-514).

The short sequence approach is mostly used for less advanced learners. For such learners, watching two hours of film in a language they struggle with would be a bit overwhelming and might lead to a decrease of motivation. When showing only one scene one has to be clear about the teaching aim. This could be, among others, to initiate a discussion, to present a cultural issue or to practice listening for a particular purpose. For a topic-based discussion it is beneficial to have as many viewpoints as possible. Sequences of films in which people give their opinions on different issues are a very good starting point for class-discussions. Furthermore, such scenes could mean some variation to traditional lessons in which discussions mostly start after having read some kind of text around a specific topic. Moreover, the advantage of film clips is “that students are able to focus on one scene in depth and explore the language of the clip and the various components of visual semiotics” (Kaiser 234). This means that students can focus on elements of the film, like dresses, setting, facial expressions, etc. that are not part of the language as such but contribute a lot to the understanding of e.g. the cultural elements of the film. Apart from starting discussions, short film sequences can also be a valuable means of practicing speaking skills. The film can be muted and the students need to take over the roles of the characters (Taylor). Thus, they have to speak fluently and also imitate moods and gestures. Due to the shortness of clips, they can be replayed a view times within one lesson in order to facilitate understanding or to work on certain issues more in-depth. If teachers put the clips on the school’s learning management system, they could also be studied as homework (Kaiser 234). Additionally, the short sequence approach lends itself very well to “introduce a topic, or a s a pre-reading or writing task to help students brainstorm ideas” (Whatley 50). The biggest disadvantage of using the short-clip approach, however, is the fact that isolated scenes

42 do not have a context and are thus difficult to interpret. Comparisons with pieces of literature can be drawn here as well. Excerpts of something never manage to explain the full picture. In the case of movie clips there is the added danger of references that are made in a particular scene that are unfamiliar to the students.

Despite the time problem, the whole-film approach has the big advantage of boosting the motivation of the students. As soon as they aware that it is not necessary to understand each and every word that is spoken, they will be astonished about their listening abilities. They will be “impressed by the amount of English they can figure out on their own” (King 514).

Lütge adds to the whole film approach (Blockpräsentation) and the short-sequence approach (Segmentpräsentation) with the interval (Intervallpräsentation) as well as the sandwich approach. By interval approach she understands the splitting up of the whole film into sequences (of about 15 minutes). Students watch the film in portions over a few lessons. The advantages lie in the facts that students can watch the whole film and there are only limited pre- , while- and post-viewing tasks per lesson. The teacher can prepare the film sequences for the students in order for them to understand the movie better. The drawbacks are that the film is cut up and there might be a loss of motivation on the part of the students. Moreover, a lot of lessons (about 6-10) have to be dedicated to just one film that is watched in quite an unnatural way. For the segment-approach the teacher only shows a single scene or sequence (e.g. the opening scene of the film) so that students can really focus on one key scene. It does not take up a lot of time and the scene or sequence can be re-viewed during the lesson. However, the enjoyment of watching a whole film might be lost when the students are only able to see one snippet of a film (43). Naturally, teachers can opt for blended forms of showing films in language classes.

No matter what approach a teacher chooses, they should follow certain steps when showing a film in class. Based on literature concerning the usage of films in English teaching, Berk has summarised the most common procedure for using a film in teaching within eight steps: 1) Pick a certain clip or film to provide the content or illustrate a concept or principle 2) Prepare specific guidelines for students or discussion questions so they have directions on what to see, hear, and look for. What’s the point of the clip/scene/film? 3) Introduce the clip/film 4) Play the clip/film

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5) Stop the clip/film at any scene to highlight a point or replay the clip/a scene for a specific in-class exercise 6) Set a time for reflection on what was seen 7) Assign an active learning activity to interact on specific questions, issues, or concepts 8) Structure a discussion around those questions in small and/or large group format (adapted from Berk 10).

2.4 Subtitles Subtitles are nowadays an option to choose on every DVD. Viewers can decide whether they want to watch a DVD with or without subtitles in different languages. Subtitles provide a written account of what characters in the film say. In case of subtitles in the language of the film, the viewers are able to read what they hear. Subtitles in a different language than the film provide a translation of what is being spoken in the film. Sometimes close-captions can also be used. Contrary to subtitles, close-captions provide a detailed description of things that are happening in the film. They are first and foremost targeted at people with a hearing impairment. Zanón distinguishes three types of subtitles: (1) bimodal subtitles – from English dialogues to English subtitles, (2) standard subtitles – from English dialogues to subtitles in the learners’ mother tongue and (3) reversed subtitles – from dialogues in the learner’s mother tongue to English subtitles (47). In English classes teachers most frequently use bimodal subtitles.

When showing a movie in class, teachers are always confronted with the question of whether to use subtitles or not. What is more, if the teacher decides to use subtitles, should they be in the L1 or the L2? The answer to this question is not straightforward (and has led to various discussions in the academic world) as it largely depends on the language level of the students. In Austrian lower forms (especially the first two years of English learning in a grammar school) it makes more sense to show an English film with German subtitles as the language proficiency of the learners is only on level A1. Hayati and Mohmedi state that “watching a film with L1 subtitles is claimed to be appropriate for beginners due to their limited range of vocabulary items” (190). The situation is different for higher-level students. “Rather than being a distraction, the double modal input appears to enhance comprehension better than simply processing subtitle through silent reading” (Hayati and Mohmedi 190). Bimodal subtitling contributes to listening and reading skills at the same time. Furthermore, it is motivating for the students having the subtitles at hand in case they get lost in the conversation going on. If one cannot follow a fast-paced conversation in English, the attention will decrease immediately and 44 the learner will be demotivated because they do not understand what is happening. Thus, English subtitles serve as a kind of scaffold for learning. Apart from particular accents that are spoken very fast, they are especially helpful if the language of the film is rather dense and the characters use a lot of technical terms.

Another positive aspect about subtitles is the fact that “children acquire more English vocabulary” (Hayati and Mohmedi 183). As the spelling and the pronunciation of English words can differ significantly, students have the added benefit of hearing and reading the word at the same time. This way they recognise words more easily when they encounter them in a different context. What is more, learners may use such new words more readily in active production. Inferring the meaning of spoken words is possible in many cases but learners will not use such words actively if they have not understood them properly. As a consequence, subtitling can contribute to speaking and writing via this deeper processing of bimodal subtitling.

King summarises the advantages of subtitles for learners as follows (516). Among others, they help students to: - follow a plot easily and get involved in plot development - learn to pronounce proper nouns in different disciplines. - acquire colloquial, context-bound expressions and slang. - process a text rapidly and improve rapid reading. - provide relaxing, stress-free learning environments where students can comprehend jokes and have a few hearty laughs. - learn different strategies for processing information.

As an additional value, subtitles lend themselves to great language activities, for instance to make students aware of what is lost when a spoken text is translated into a written one. Elements that are foreign to the native culture or language must, in a way, be explained or even neutralised (Kaiser 243) so that the target audience understands them. In this translation process a lot of choices must be taken which students are mostly not aware of. An additional difficulty of subtitling lies in the fact that emotions of the spoken words must be captured correctly by using language accordingly.

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Even though subtitles are a very helpful means in teaching and learning English, they have a few drawbacks as well. When watching a movie without subtitles, students are forced to guess the meaning from the provided context by closely concentrating on key words and the dialogues. Furthermore, they need to pay close attention to “visual clues, facial expressions, voice and sound track” as well as to key words spoken by the characters (King 517). Having managed to understand the gist of an entire film in English without the aid of subtitles, students may feel that they have accomplished something which they had not thought possible.

Good students might also feel distracted by the subtitles and may even consider them a nuisance. In most cases it is unavoidable to focus one’s attention to what is written at the bottom of the screen. By constantly “reading” the film a lot of details in the plot may go unnoticed. What is more, there is some difficulty to “break the habit of reading captions once students are used to doing so” (Zanón 44). By constantly asking students to do exercises based on subtitles, they might get used to only “reading” the film and not listening to the dialogues and watching the actors any more. However, at the end of the day depending on the purpose of showing the film, every teacher has to decide for themselves whether they use subtitles or not.

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3 From Literacy to Film Literacy

3.1 What is literacy? Literacy was originally described as “the ability to read and write, to decode and produce a sequential order of written words” (Viebrock 13). It has “traditionally been linked to an alphabet or a language code – that is, through reading and writing – and linked with print media” (Donaghy 9). Until quite recently, students in school needed to work exclusively with written texts. Films were only shown towards the end of a term or when nothing much was happening any more. Since the emergence of the mobile and smart phones and other media, this situation has changed dramatically and students need to be competent users of media. Applied to films this means that young people should be film literate. This is important insofar as “the moving image is the most complex and rich mode of communication ever invented. It is also the first mode of communication that most children encounter without much if any adult mediation…” This is why it is essential that film is taught in schools. All educators have to understand that film is not just a nice way of passing time but – used wisely – manages to educate the students just as well as traditional teaching and learning resources. “It is now essential to acknowledge the importance of moving image media alongside print in a new and wider definition of literacy” (“Film: 21st Century Literacy 17). What is more, film needs to be seen as a form of text on its own. In a traditional teaching context, literary works were read in class. After a thorough analysis, the film adaption or parts of the adaption were shown. In many cases these film versions of the original piece of literature were regarded as secondary in quality to the book. Technological enhancements (like film or more recently computers, etc.) need to be integrated into the classrooms as teachers educate the future members of our society. These members need to be “literate” in as many forms of media as possible. Vetrie states that “our purpose in bringing film into the classroom is to utilize it as literature” (44). For some teachers it is a big step to show movies in their English classes as society partly blames film and new media for the low literacy levels of our students. It all boils down to the way we use films in the classroom. First of all, teachers should select the films wisely and second of all they should teach the students to contrast the techniques of analysing films with similar techniques used in print literature because if taught as literature, film can be used to increase literacy skills and as a basis for many writing and critical-thinking activities. Vetrie compares literary and cinematic signs (40-41):

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LITERARY SIGNS CINEMATIC SIGNS The Word – The word book is a signifier. What The Image – A visual representation of a it represents is the signified. There can be a “book” is almost identical to the source. It is great distance between the two. much closer to a book, conceptually, than the word. Signifier and signified are almost identical. Metaphor – a comparison of unlike things in a The Index – measures a quality not because it is highly connotative sense. identical but has inherent relationship to it. The Symbol – convention (in the deployment of The Symbol – The signifier represents the speech and writing) signified through convention rather than resemblance. The Picture The Icon – The signifier represents the signified by its likeness.

Goodwyn argues in a similar way when he states that, in many schools, there still persists the myth that “the written text is not only the original but is also the only valuable version of that narrative therefore the ‘visualization’ is a simple and easy version”. Furthermore, such an opinion makes students believe that “reading literature is always hard and dull while watching is easy and enjoyable” (26). It seems like literature and film are rivals and need to compete for a place in English language curricula. It is absolutely necessary to overcome such a notion. Used wisely, film can expand and enrich a literary text by presenting moving images of it. It is and hopefully will always be a fact that moving images cannot replace literary text. New media give teachers the chance to make seemingly dull literature come alive for the students and adaptions should become concepts of their own right (Goodwyn 28).

3.2 What is film literacy? As different countries put various emphasis on education with and about media, different terms have emerged which define the field. In the United Kingdom the education about media is called “media education” and its learning outcomes are known under the umbrella term “media literacy” which is widely used nationally and internationally (Bazalgette 6). Media education has a broader scope than film education, however, they both foster culture, aesthetics, critical thinking and creative production. Baker defines media literacy as “the ability to understand how the media work, how they convey meaning. Media literacy also involves critical thinking about the thousands of media messages we are bombarded with on a daily basis” (20). Dealing with a visual text encompasses the same habits (e.g. predicting, making connections, asking questions, interpreting, etc.) that a good reader brings to a written text. In both cases “meaning is made through the details of character, theme, plot, mood, conflict, and symbolism” (Xhemaili 62).

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Young people nowadays are exposed to moving images wherever and whenever they want. However, in our digital world they are not really taught what to make of these moving images and how they should be interpreted. Film literacy is a subcategory of media literacy. If teachers want their students to become media literate, they need to teach them film education. Using films in a lesson thus means that young people are exposed to multimodal texts that combine sound and visual features. The problem thereby is that teenagers are – in many cases – better and more competent users of new media than many of their teachers. This is one of the reasons why in some schools, media competency is really important and in others it is not. It is always the teachers who foster or slow down the usage of new media in the classroom. Under new media quite a lot of technological advances – like smart phones, tablets or new software – can be subsumed, films are hardly seen as new media. Films have been around for decades now. It is always the methods that are applied to existing media, that make them new and interesting and pedagogically advanced and useful.

Having mentioned the digital age, it is of great importance to clarify why films are seen as resources for teaching. Usually, young people watch shorter clips on platforms like YouTube or advertisements that appeal to them. Nowadays students watch a lot of vlogs – video blogs – as well which also lend themselves to being valuable teaching resources. In a school context, films are mostly around 90 minutes long and comprise a story structure and characters that can be analysed. In the past, teachers showed film adaptions of classic literature to demonstrate that the book is in most cases better than the film. Nowadays there is a shift towards mainstream films. These can be analysed in a variety of ways and lend themselves to discussions about language, culture, semiotics and camera techniques to name only a few.

Austrian teachers, as noted above, have to respect the national curriculum as well as the CEFR. Both documents state that, for various reasons, films and other audio-visual materials have to be integrated into teaching. The CEFR states that the most important reasons for showing films in class are that students can follow changes of topic and identify main points. Additionally, they should be able to handle slang and idiomatic language. In a nutshell, a student who has all these skills and abilities, is film literate.

When defining film literacy for English language classes, Thaler draws upon the concept of communicative language teaching which has become the dominant approach to teaching and learning a foreign language. For him, the general aim of using audio-visual media in language

49 teaching can be termed “communicative film teaching, audio-visual literacy, or simply: film literacy” (33). This concept consists of the three dimensions knowledge, attitudes and the three skills listening-viewing, analysing and creating. Knowledge that students would need in order to be film literate would encompass a short history of film, of film genres as well as of cinematic techniques. When it comes to the three skills, one has to bear in mind that viewing film is different from “just” understanding it. Even though listening-viewing is similar to listening, it is a variant and must be taught as a skill on its own because it is much more complex than listening. When watching a film “the process of listening comprehension must be synchronized with the one of viewing comprehension, i.e. spoken texts have to be understood, images to be interpreted, para-linguistic features to be decoded” (Thaler 40-41). To visualise the differences between listening and viewing, Thaler has come up with the following overview (41):

Listening-Viewing Listening Viewing - general competence (e.g. knowledge - understanding actions of the world) - interpreting iconic elements (images, - linguistic competence (e.g. ability to scenery, objects) discriminate sounds) - interpreting paralingual features - prosodic competence (e.g. ability to (gestures, mime, posture, eye interpret intonation and pitch) contact, distance) - socio-pragmatic competence (e.g. - understanding cinematographic ability to identify text types) techniques (colours, light, camera - strategic competence (e.g. ability to angles, cuts) apply culture-specific - knowledge of the world, intercultural scripts/schemata) knowledge - reading comprehension (subtitles, inserts, written text in the picture)

For analysing a film, Thaler (46) suggests three dimensions: the cinematic, the dramatic and the literary dimension. Even though the cinematic dimension which includes technicalities of films (e.g. camera movement, camera angles, etc.) is very interesting, it is not the main focus of this thesis as it only marginally contributes to the skills needed for the Matura. The same is true for the dramatic dimension which is concerned, among others, with the casting, the acting, dialogue and costumes. The literary dimension, however, is the one most beneficial in building the skills they need for their final exam. It is about the story, the topics and the characters. The second skill is analysing, a phase that starts after a film clip or a whole film has been watched. Post-viewing activities should support the analysing stage in which the students should go

50 beyond the text/film and try to do activities, like “inferencing, elaborating, extracting, generalizing, evaluating, commenting, constructing, and creating” (Thaler 46).

Whenever teachers use a film (clip) or other media, they give their students an opportunity to better understand: - how the media message was created and constructed - who the intended audience is - what techniques might be used to engage, inform, persuade, educate - who or what might be omitted and why - who benefits/profits from the message being told in this way - what biases might be inherent - what stereotypes are promoted (Baker 24).

Even though Baker writes about media in general, his statements can and should be applied to films and in consequence to film literacy as well. Students need to be aware of the fact, that every film sends a message and this message was made on decisions taken for specific reasons. Film literacy, thus, first and foremost means to teach students to become critical when watching films and to think about how films managed to evoke certain feelings or even prejudices in the viewers. This knowledge can then be applied to any form of media or text students get in contact with.

The British Film Institute got to the heart of it by stating: “We live in a world of moving images. To participate fully in our society and its culture means to be as confident in the use and understanding of moving images as of the printed word. Both are essential aspects of literacy in the twenty-first century. In the same way that we take for granted that society has a responsibility to help children to read and write – to use and enjoy words – we should take it for granted that we help children and young people to use, enjoy and understand moving images; not just to be technically capable but to be culturally literate too.” (Film: 21st Century Literacy)

According to Decke-Cornill and Luca, teachers mostly follow three different approaches when analysing films: (1) the media critical, (2) the film-aesthetic and the (3) reception-aesthetic approach. Within the media critical approach, students should be taught to become critical “readers” and interpreters of a film. A generation that does not read a lot any more, should become literate with the help of a different medium. This used to be done by comparing literary texts with their film adaptions. The film-aesthetic-approach analyses filmic devices and their

51 functions. Students learn to express themselves in film language and compare different films, analyse sound and look at elements that trigger a certain effect. Within the reception-aesthetic approach, the viewer takes on the role of the participant, the judging viewer as well as the critic (14-18). All these approaches were included under the term Filmverstehen. Decke-Cornill and Luca distinguish Filmerleben which caters for the emotional side as well as the symbols underlying every film.

Even though there is enthusiasm in the educational world about the medium of film as a valuable resource for teaching, it is – as Decke- Cornill and Luca stated – not advisable to leave the aesthetic side out of the discussion. Movies are first and foremost media to entertain and/or to convey certain messages. By over-analysing films for the sake of educational benefits, this message can easily be lost in the depths of a too close reading of language items. A quote by Will Rogers, a US-American actor and comedian at the turn of the twentieth century, can be read accordingly. “There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.”9 He is clearly an advocate for the aesthetic analysis of movies. Similarly, Decke-Cornill and Luca argue, that from a pedagogical perspective there is an emotional-subjective way (Filmerleben) of watching a film as well as a cognitive-analytical (Filmanalyse) one (12). These are the two basic concepts that are distinguished in film pedagogy.

9 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90498-there-s-only-one-thing-that-can-kill-the-movies-and 18.11.2017 52

Apart from Filmerleben and Filanalyse, Lütge adds Filmbildung and Hörverstehenskompetenz in order to describe film literacy. She visualised these four components of film literacy very well. For her, it consists of Filmbildung (film education), Filmerleben (film experience), Filmanalyse (film analysis) as well as Hörsehverstehenskompetenz (listening-comprehending competence). Depending on the aim of an English lesson, teachers choose films that cater for one or the other aspect. Thereby the analysis and “reading” of a text are more film-centred and the experiencing of the film is learner-centred.

Filmbildung

Filmkompetenz Filmanalyse Filmerleben (film literacy)

Hörverstehens- kompetenz

Lütge (25)

Similarly, but in more detail, Blell and Lütge have summarised competences that are necessary to be film literate (37). For them, there are four cognitive and affective skills and attitudes that interplay with one another to build film literacy. (1) Filmerleben means that viewers show verbal and non-verbal reactions and can form personal opinions about the film. The emotional factors that are at play when watching movies are the focus. Filmerleben is the basis for doing film analysis and triggers the motivation for the medium film. As a consequence, students can transfer this Filmerleben into an active creative mediawork. (2) Sehverstehen encompasses the skill to understand films and to understand the mechanisms underlying manipulative processes that are part of any piece of media. (3) The third skill concerns the listening skills while watching a movie. The relationships between audio and visual channels are in the foreground. The Hör- and Sehensverstehen also means that viewers develop narrative competences and a feel for genre-typical plots. The last competence is (4) the analysis of a film. Thereby, students should be able to use technical language and analyse a film according to the effect e.g. camera angles or field sizes have on a viewer. Students should additionally be able to aesthetically and critically assess plots. Apart from these four skills and competences, there is the all-

53 encompassing cultural and intercultural learning that happens when watching a movie. Students should become aware of similarities and differences between the own and the foreign culture depicted in the film.

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4 Teaching Bend It like Beckham – Film Analysis Faulstich created a basic model for the analysis of films in four steps. When analysing a film, the first step is always concerned with the plot. Viewers ask themselves what happens in the film. In a second step, the focus is put on the different characters and the third step is concerned with the “how” – how is the film constructed from a technical point of view? The fourth step tries to find out what message the film wants to send and thus what ideology forms the basis of the film (29). In a similar fashion, Thaler divides film analysis into the three dimensions cinematic, dramatic and literary dimension. The cinematic dimension encompasses camera movement, camera angles, camera speed, field sizes, editing, sound and colour. Dramatic elements are casting, acting, dialogues, locations, props, make-up and costumes. The literary dimension of film is the same as for written literary texts, namely the story, topics, characters, setting and narrative point of view (45-46). The following subchapters follow Faulstich’s four steps because they include the ideological part of the analysis as well es elements of Thaler’s analysis suggestions.

4.1 Step one – The Plot Bend It Like Beckham was released in 2002. It is a romantic sports film depicting two girls who want to become professional football players. The story is set in Great Britain and the main characters are the British girl Juliette (Jules) and the daughter of Punjabi Sikhs living in Hounslow, London, Jesminder (Jess). The girls play for a girls’ football team and are coached by the Irish coach Joe. Jess has to lie to her parents about her football ambitions because they are of the opinion that playing football is not suitable for their daughter. Therefore, Jess plays behind their backs and as soon as they find out they forbid her to play. Jess’ father, who was a sportsman himself and could not fulfil his dreams, in the end allows his daughter to follow her dreams. The two girls are scouted by a US football coach and given a scholarship at Santa Clara University in California.

4.2 Step two – The Characters Literature and film analysis in English teaching is done because students should get familiar with literature and film and learn what linguistic means and theories can be used to interpret a text. Another reason is that it is a very good means to learn and practise new words. In case of characters, students have the opportunity to get to know many adjectives that describe character which they can use when e.g. writing texts on their own or talking about people. Hildebrand et

55 al. compiled a vocabulary list for characterisation especially for Bend it Like Beckham (54)10. They also propose very useful exercises which allow for transfer of the knowledge for different purposes and tasks. Characters in Bend it Like Beckham that could be analysed are: Jessminder (Jess) Bhamra (protagonist), Pinky Bhamra (Jess’s older sister), Mr. and Mrs. Bhamra (Jess’ parents), Jules Paxton (Jess’ friend), Paula and Alan Paxton (Jules’ parents), Tony (one of Jess’ closest friends) and Joe (Jess’ and Jules’ football coach). For a thorough analysis it would be necessary to analyse the different characters but also to go beyond that11. Students would need to have a closer look at the acting as such as well as the dialogues between the characters. Another aspect would be the costumes which lend themselves to a thorough cultural analysis as well. There are, for example, the Indian clothes that are very colourfully depicted in Bend it Like Beckham. Students should think about how these contribute to the overall feel of the film.

4.3 Step three – Technical elements of a film It is not necessary that students know every little technical detail of a film but when analysing and interpreting films it is essential that they know basic technical terms. Among those basic terms are field sizes, point of view, camera angles, camera movement as well as the editing of a film. Additionally, sound effects as well as colour and lightning are of high importance as well. Most students will probably not have analysed a film according to these technical elements before. The will literally see films in a different light when they are aware of how cinematic techniques are able to manipulate the viewers. Liebelt12 compiled a short leaflet for students with the most basic technical terms to be used when analysing films. It is a good resource and starting point for usage in English language teaching.

4.4 Step four – Film theories – ideology and message Step four is concerned with the ideologies and messages underlying a film. These ideologies are discovered through looking at films on the basis of various film theories. “Film theory means many things to many people and can seem to mean anything to some.”13 Film theory – like literary theory – is concerned with the analysis of a text. The text in this context is the

10 See page 97 in the Appendix. 11 A visualisation of the relations between the character is included on page 96 in the Appendix. 12 Liebelt, Wolf. The Language of Film. Fachausdrücke, Interpretationsfragen und Redemittellisten für die Arbeit mit Filmen im Englischunterricht. Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Lehrerbildung und Schulentwicklung, http://www.nibis.de/nibis3/uploads/2med-giersberg/files/tfm06.pdf (3.4.2018). 13 Reynolds Daniel, Routledge Encyclopaedia 2015, p, 98.

56 film. It is not surprising that film theory follows similar patterns and theories like literary theory.

Film Theory emerged in the 1970s and expanded rapidly from then on. As McDonald (7) states, what was later called “Anglo-American film theory” developed largely out of nothing and at the beginning did not share any common intellectual or philosophical principles. However, it was set within a political and institutional context. In the 1960s, student movements became very important in America. In the era of the Cold War there was a new political consciousness. Civil rights movements as well as anti-Vietnam-war protests emerged. Alongside the political movements, a new era of art came into being as well. On its forefront was music but film was also understood as an artistic means to express one’s (political) opinion. New left-wing student movements began to join forces with grass-roots film organisations. One of the first film- organisation was called Newsreel and comprised young filmmakers who wanted to protest against the politics of their times with the help of the medium film. Gradually, filmmakers started to form theories on how to best convey their messages. At the beginning, the debates centred around the question of the relationship between politics and film. Later on, the discussions slowly moved away from a politic-centred one towards a film-centred one which then formed the cradle of film theory/theories as we know them today.

Basically, film theories are largely connected or intertwined with literary theories. Films can also be regarded as text and thus it is no surprise that this relatively new medium relied on well- established literary theories. Such theories emerged in the first place because as soon as an audience reads or watches a text people are in one or the other way affected by it and thus any interpretation is always based on an encounter between reader or viewer and the text. Given different historical, ideological or linguistic developments, to name just a few, text can be read and interpreted accordingly. Within different schools of thought, one and the same film can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways. It is thereby important to note – especially in a teaching context – that there is hardly any right or wrong when interpreting texts. Traditionally, students are taught a formalist interpretation of poems or texts. It seemingly is a straightforward and practical way of doing interpretations as students are given definitions of literary terms which they should detect and analyse within a text. In order to teach critical thinking, which is a skill required for the twenty first century, students should additionally be able to interpret texts and films according to different schools of thoughts. Applied to Bend it Like Beckham, a

57 few prominent theories are presented which can only be seen as a suggested selection – albeit a practical one – for interpretation of the movie in class.

Austrian students have been brought up in a school culture that is, in many cases, focused on spotting and avoiding mistakes. Young people are not really accustomed to the fact that something cannot be seen as entirely right or wrong. Interpretations of literary works do not have the prominent place in English teaching that they used to have some years ago. Thus, students are nowadays not used to doing interpretations on a regularly basis. It might be unusual for some of the students to experience that there is not the one interpretation that is correct. They need to be taught that different film theories render different readings or results of one and the same film. Additionally, young people tend to analyse films according to whether or not they like them. In some cases, they add reasons for their likes or dislikes. In English lessons it is important to give them a feel for the aesthetic side of movie making in order for them to realise why they like or dislike a film.

4.4.1 Psychoanalytical Film Theory Psychoanalysis found its way into film theory in the early 1970s. The two most prominent academics in the field were Siegmund Freud and Jacques Lacan who were advocates for two strands of psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud was more concerned with the sexual fantasies of people and tried to explain the phenomenon of irrational behaviour, Lacan developed a theory of the subject including the linked concepts of imaginary and symbolism. Even though the theories of the two psychoanalysts would fill volumes, it is the intention of this thesis to concentre only on one element of psychoanalysis, namely dreams. Miller and Stam note that the reason why film theorists, critics and commentators have been fascinated by psychoanalytic ideas to explain cinema is because “the cinema seems to display a fundamental kinship with the irrational that psychoanalysis seeks to explain” (124). There is a strong affinity of film to the world of the irrational thought and dream. After all, “dreams are the stage of the imagination that are perhaps most readily apprehensible” (125).

The reason why Bend it Like Beckham can be interpreted under psychoanalytic aspects are the frequently occurring dreams that Jess has about her life as a football star. The film even starts with such a dream when the viewers see a football match of Manchester United and Jess as a co-player of the superstar David Beckham. The problematic aspects of the film are highlighted right at the beginning when there is a contrast between the three famous sport commentators 58 commenting on the Manchester United match and then Jess’ mother is depicted in the studio as well. She looks quite out of place and states the problem(s) that runs through the film. She complains about her daughter running around with men showing her bare legs and thus brings shame on her family. There is another scene where Jess needs to hang up the washing in the garden but the only thing she is thinking about is football. She finds a ball on the grass and practises free-kicks dreaming and imagining that her mother and other Indian female relatives form a wall.

4.4.2 Marxist Film Theory “Because film is a system of representation that both produces and reproduces cultural signification, it will ineluctably be tied up with questions of class” (Hayward 83). The theory of class goes back to Karl Marx. In his most famous work Das Kapital he posed the question of what constitutes a social class. It was all about the position of a person or group within the economic structure of society. Social divisions in society are the classes (James 186). These divisions arise from the fact that there are people who own capital and people who have no financial means but own the power of labour. Class, thus is “based on objective differences among sets of people and defined, quite negatively, as in opposition to other sets of people” (Hayward 84). Marxism has economic, political and ideological forms of practice. Within the economic practice, productions and thus material conditions for living are established. The political produces the relation between middle and working class or bourgeois and proletarian. Ideological practice results in subjectivity for the individuals (Branigan and Buckland 114). When, due to political developments in the 1960s, the issue of class was no longer so prominent, it got replaced by conflicts around race and gender. There was still a class divide but the roots of it were not in the modes of productions but rather in the marginalisation of certain groups of society. Theorists after Marx (e.g. Gramsci) argued that class conflict is most evident in cultural artefacts, for example dress codes of different groups of society. Seen in this light, in “Marxist thinking, cultural aesthetics is very bound up with the concept of class” (Hayward 84). It is exactly this cultural aesthetics that is relevant for film theory in four ways. (1) analysis of class relations within the text, (2) the historical and cultural contexts of the production, (3) modes and practices of production and (4) the ideological effect of the cinematic apparatus upon spectator-text relations (Hayward 85). The spectator-text relations refer to what mainstream cinema does. It serves as a mirror for the spectators and viewers – consciously or unconsciously – identify with a certain character in the film.

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Bend it Like Beckham can also be interpreted according to the Marxist theory of film. Quite obviously there is the divide between the English society and the Indian one. It is always a matter of us versus them. This becomes especially prominent in the character of Jess’ father. At minute 42:23 he says to Joe, “Young man, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was the best fast bowler in our school. Our team even won the East African Cup. But when I came to this country, nothing. I was not allowed to play in any of the teams, and the bloody goras in their clubhouses made fun of my turban and sent me off packing.”

He was not good enough for English society and was not allowed to participate in their social clubs. He was seen as a different, rather lower, class than the English.

4.4.2.1 Ethnic identity and class In 2015 a massive wave of migration swept over Europe. Since then many countries have been confronted with the immigration of people from different cultures. This process has proven very difficult and is far from being finished. Ethnic diversity, however, is not a new phenomenon. The United Kingdom has at various times been the prime country of immigration. Bend it Like Beckham portrays the life and potential challenges of an Indian family in the UK. Whereas first and foremost the parent generation tries to maintain their Indian culture, the younger generation (Jess) is torn between her Indian as well as the English culture. Bisin et al. deal with this “cultural conformity and cultural distinction”. They are of the opinion that cultural conformity and cultural distinction are “specific dimensions of individuals’ preferences” (147). In the concrete example Jess is in love with a British man but throughout most of the film her family is against this relationship as she is supposed to marry – like her sister – an Indian man. Even though her family has lived in the UK for quite some time, they still try very hard to keep their Indian traditions and culture. In the movie this can be seen in the way they cook. It is important for Jess’ mother Mrs. Bhamra to teach her daughter how to cook proper Indian meals.

4.4.3 Genre Theory Put very bluntly – genre looks at a particular type of text. This is important insofar, as students taking their final exams are confronted with different text types as well. They have to write texts according to certain standards. It is not always easy or straightforward for them to decide which elements are inherent in a particular text type. A similar problem can be noted for film genres. It is not clear who creates genres. Is it the filmmakers, the studios, the reviewers, the

60 critics, the audiences? (Cohan 227) What is relatively undisputed is the fact that genre organises films according to their type. However, it is more than just cataloguing as genre does not refer just to film type but to “spectator expectation and hypothesis (speculation as to how the film will end)”. What is more, “genres are not static, they evolve with the times, even disappear” (Hayward 197). Genres follow certain codes and conventions as well as styles and stories by with the audience recognises them. “Genres offer prospective consumers a way to choose between films and help indicate the kind of audience for whom a particular movie was made” (Berry-Flint 25). Problems with definitions of genre arise because different interest groups define them for their purposes. “Film scholars tend to define genres for purposes of interpretation and critical analysis, while producers, publicists, and audiences may use them as descriptive tools” (Berry-Flint 26). Therefore, genres can never be without ideology as well as interest in form. When teaching genre in class, it is beneficial for the students to find out what elements define a certain genre and analyse its criteria.

In a nutshell, “a genre film is a film based on subjects, themes, or styles that have become familiar because they have been used often” (Boggs 412). Audiences know what to expect from characters, settings or plots. The genre theory assesses how a film fits into a body of films with the same features. Boggs suggests asking the following questions when evaluating a genre film (413-414): - What are the basic requirements for this particular genre, and how well does this film fit them? - Does the film work in such a way that all our expectations for films of this type are fulfilled? - What variations and innovations are present in the film? What variations make the film stand out from other films of the same genre? - What basic regional or national beliefs, values, and myths are reflected and reinforced by the film and are they still relevant?

Bend it Like Beckham is described – for example by the BBC film review14 – as a drama and a comedy. More precisely, it can be described as a romantic comedy and sports drama. What qualifies the film as a romantic comedy and thus the basic requirement for the genre is quite obvious. There is the (mostly) subtly love between Jess and her coach Joe. Naturally, things

14 http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2002/03/19/bend_it_like_beckham_2002_review.shtml (2.4.2018) 61 are not so easy as Jess’ friend Jules also used to be in love with Joe. The expectations of the film of the romantic type are fulfilled because in the end the two lovers (more or less) get together. They had to overcome various obstacles but got together in the end. What makes the film stand out from other films of the same genre is the fact that a girl wanting to play football is at the centre of the story. It is unusual for a girl, let alone an Indian girl, to play professional football. The film can additionally be called a sports drama because Jess really has to fight for her dream and at some point she even gave up and very nearly accepted her fate. What contributes to the romantic genre is the fact that the film has a happy ending.

4.4.4 Feminist/Gender Film Theory Feminist film theories emerged in the late 1960s as a result of the second wave of feminism. The first wave started in the early 1900s with the Suffragette movement and the second wave entered the world of academia, journalism and film studies (Hayward 155). Turim states that “the enormously broad and varied work on issues of women’s representation in film and the historical emergence of women making films has made teaching women in film and feminist film theory an exhilarating but daunting task” (40). What she means by that is the sheer fact that there are so many angles one can approach feminism in film. There are ample options: particular questions (e.g. the body of women in a particular workplace, etc.), historical periods, a survey of key films to name just a few. Even though it is a great achievement that feminist theory was established as a field of its own, one has to be caution not to oversimplify matters or fall back on stereotypes. What is more, there is not one single feminist theory but rather different perspectives.

What is essential is to be aware of the historical development of women’s rights and the status of women in different societies. Whether students liked or hated the character should only be the starting point of an analysis. It is important that student connect the social historical context with the filmic representation. Thus, is it necessary that students watch films from different periods of time and make connections to the respective status women had in society. Hayward suggest dividing feminist film theory into three periods (from 1968 to 1974, from 1975 to 1983 and from 1984 to 2010s). In the first period there was a shift from class to gender and more specifically to gender differences. In the period from 1975 to 1983 the focus was on how women were presented in films and how they were positioned within the structure of the narrative. Women were often depicted as the object of male desire and the spectator could mostly only identify with the male protagonist. Conflicts between the two sexes were often depicted but 62 gradually films gave space for a woman’s point of view. The third era saw a debate around female spectatorship as well as a question of class. Femininity was still seen as in relation to masculinity. What this specific period has achieved was, to broaden the feminist debate to age, gender, race, class and sexuality and thus move away from the male-centred effects of reading a film. The biggest achievement, however, has been the opening of the concept to all women – not just white ones. (155-166).

The feminist film theory assumes that art influences the attitude of a culture. In case of films, feminist film critics want to show how the language and the symbols that are used in films are a reflection of male ideology. They ask for equal representation of men and women in films and urge that female characters are not reduced to stereotyped roles. Feminist theory reaches beyond the mere film and also includes directors and screenwriters and looks how their work affects the presentation of the film (Boggs 415). Whenever analysing films from a female/gender perspective, the following questions should be considered: - Are the main characters male or female? - How are women or gay people portrayed in the film? Are they passive, victimised, or are they active, assertive, and important to the development of the story? - Who made the film? Do you think the gender of the filmmakers influenced their treatment and presentation of the story? - Did the film seem to advocate any specific political ideas about the rights and equality of women or gays? (adapted from Boggs 416)

Bend it Like Beckham can first and foremost be seen as a feminist film. Things have become better, but when the film was released in 2002 it was still very unusual for a girl or woman to become a professional football player. The film very openly plays with male ideology and symbols. Football as a sport is rather male-dominated and Jules and Jess work very hard to prove that they are as good as boys. What resonates throughout the film is the public opinion that male football is superior and that female football is ridiculed and not really taken seriously. This becomes especially clear with Joe the coach. His father does not take him seriously because he “only” coaches girls and does not seem to be a good enough coach to have the responsibility for a men’s team. Moreover, the training conditions for the girls are by far not as good as the boys’. Furthermore, the audience as well as Jess’ football colleagues in the park ridicule the girls and reduce them to sexual objects. Initially, they are not seen as women doing serious sport but this changes when they win their matches and prove that they can actually play

63 football. To highlight this, students should watch minute 9:34 where for the first time in the film the audience sees Jess playing football in the park as the only girl among boys.

4.4.4.1 Multiculturalism and Gender Bend it Like Beckham deals with the parallel worlds of an Indian immigrant family within the United Kingdom. They try to maintain their Indian traditions and customs by simultaneously integrating into UK society. Apart from other differences, the role of the woman is seen in different lights in the two societies. At a first glance the viewers get the impression that Jess, who represents the younger generation of immigrants, has more – and at the same time less – problems with multiculturalism. She is basically an English girl when she leaves her parents’ house but becomes Indian within the confines of her home. For the outside world she wants to be like all other English teenagers whereas at home she tries hard to live up to the expectations of her parents. For the older generation, multiculturalism does not seem to be a big problem and they do not strive to blend into English society. They keep up their Indian traditions and have established a parallel society. However, one has to mention that Indian culture is more or less reduced to “food, music, and marriage” (Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb 147). One could argue that Indian culture in the UK is stereotyped. This becomes especially apparent in Mrs. Bhamra who is portrayed as a very simple-minded woman whose only concerns are food, religion and good husbands for her daughters.

There is a huge Indian community in the United Kingdom and so it does not seem to be a problem to remain among oneselves. Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb note, however, that the film “does little to challenge the structure of English society” and “the version of multiculturalism offered by the film is one of assimilation to a utopian English norm” (142). They also point out that the film just scratches on the surface of real problems as that there are substantial “limitations of the film from the point of view of recent trends in cultural studies and critical race theory” (143).

4.4.5 Queer Film Theory No matter which anthology of film theories one consults, each and every author struggles with the definition of the term queer. Branigan and Buckland see the difficulties in several complications that need to be addressed. Queer can function as a noun, a verb and as an adjective. Secondly, “when analysing the queer aspects of films, they must consider queer filmmakers, queer content and production, queer distribution and exhibition, queer reception, 64 and the myriad combinations of these aspects” (384). There is, thirdly, the time aspect as well. It is necessary to consider how queer has changed over time and on different places around the world. The term queer was coined in the 1980s and gradually encompassed every sexual orientation as an alternative to lesbian and gay, which was seen as too limited and tried to represent everyone outside the social “norm” of heterosexuality. Furthermore, it was “welcomed as an alternative to the constraints of identity-politics-driven appellations of the 1970s and ‘80s” (Erhart 174). With AIDS in the 1990s, queer cinema became more visible to the broad public.

It is not entirely clear where lesbianism is positioned – most probably between feminist and queer theories. Hayward states that “queer theory can be seen as a desire to challenge and push further debates on gender and sexuality put in place by feminist film theories (amongst others)” (326). No matter how one defines queer, maybe its greatest strength lies in the fact that it “can open up texts and lead us to read texts that seem straight, differently – or view them from a new and different angle” (Hayward 327). Bend it Like Beckham can also be seen from such a new and different angle than merely the romantic one that meets the eye.

Bend it Like Beckham could be interpreted from a queer perspective for three reasons. First, because of the underlying assumption that Jess and Jules are in a lesbian relationship (which will be dealt with in the following sub-chapter) and second, because Jess’ cousin Tony outs himself as being gay. The third reason is a bit subtler and has to do with the former Manchester United and Real Madrid football star David Beckham. He gave the film its title but only appears briefly at the end of the movie. The viewers do not really see or recognise him but when Jules and Jess are on the airport to fly to the USA, David Beckham and his wife Victoria are accompanied by bodyguards through the airport. Beckham was a huge star in the 2000s. He was a great footballer known for his free kicks and crosses on the pitch but was famous off pitch for his tattoos, changing hair style and stylish outfit. He coined the term “metrosexual” which is a word formation from the words metropolitan and heterosexual. It is a term used for men from whom it is not important to be explicitly categorised as being typical male. Lindner even states that his metro-sexuality encompasses “his status as a gay male icon (which he embraces rather than rejects), his feminising concern with appearance, as well as his status as a fashion icon, sex symbol and father” (212). When it comes to gender and sexuality, the boundaries of the football star David Beckham become very blurred. Apart from the constant references of Jess to her idol, there is another scene that is worth noticing in terms of

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(homo)sexuality. Jess is frustrated because her parents want her to marry an Indian man but she confesses that she very nearly kissed her coach when they were in Germany and that she likes him. Tony tries to make her feel better by saying, “Look, Jess, you can’t plan who you fall for. It just happens. – I mean look at Posh and Becks” (minute 58:52). Posh is the nickname of David Beckham’s wife. She used to be a singer in the band Spice Girls and she was referred to as Posh Spice. Tony takes the couple as an example to show that people cannot choose who they love. Jess thinks that this refers to her and Joe but what Tony really wants to say is that he likes Beckham a lot – and not just as a footballer. This is the moment when Tony outs himself as being gay and, funnily enough, Jess’ reaction is “But you’re Indian” as if there were no gay Indian men. This also sheds some light on the attitude Indian society has towards homosexuality.

4.4.5.1 Women, Sport and Sexuality/Homosexuality It is absolutely not far-fetched to interpret Bend it Like Beckham as a lesbian or queer film. As Lindner notes, the original script for the film included a relationship between Jess and Jules but the director did not want to offend Indian audiences and thus decided against it and to include a heterosexual romance between Jess and Joe instead (217). Jules and Jess are passionate about a sport that is traditionally played by men. As Caudwell states, “boxing and football remain inextricably linked to men and masculinity” (265). In the world of football, homosexuality is still a taboo. There are some players who have already ended their career and outed themselves. One of the most famous examples being the former German national player Thomas Hitzelsperger. The majority of the male homosexual players does not dare to tell the public the truth about their sexual orientation because they are afraid of homophobic fans. The situation is totally different in women’s teams. Quite a few female players openly declared their homosexuality and have reported that it was no problem for them to continue their career in sport without any problems. Lindner notes that “in sharp contrast to gay male visibility, the sporting world is one of the most readily available contemporary contexts that evoke associations with lesbianism” (208). There are many instances in the film where the two protagonists are physically very close to each other. Jess and Jules are often shown in an embrace but this is in most instances due to celebrations within the team after having scored a goal. The same is true for male players. Whenever a player in a male team scores a goal he embraces or he is embraced by all the other team members. In female contexts such embraces are immediately interpreted as lesbianism.

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Apart from the main topic football, Bend It Like Beckham also has a romantic subplot. Jules and Jess are in love with their coach and even put their relationship to the test because of Joe. Heterosexuality is established as the norm. However, there are a few instances where homosexuality plays a role. First of all, Jesse’s gay cousin, Tony, outs himself as homosexual. For him this was a big step as he used to play football with his friends and more than once they make fun of gay people. Second, Jule’s mother Paula openly criticises homosexuality when she says, “There is a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a man” (minute 15:26). She refers to Mel C, one of the members of the girl band “Spice Girls” and thus states that being athletic as a girl is something out of the ordinary. It is interesting to notice that there is a scene where Jules and Jess are in a sport shop together buying football boots for Jess. The two girls seem to bond and this shopping scene is in stark contrast to other shopping scenes in the film where, for example, Jules goes shopping with her mom and is absolutely not happy about it. The two girls are depicted as non-shoppers which is something unusual for girls. Jules does not want to buy lacy underwear and Jess is not interested in shopping a dress for her sister’s wedding. In both scenes the respective mother is highly disappointed that her daughter does not seem to be a proper girl. What is more, the football boot scene is accompanied by music of Mel C who was said to be lesbian herself (Lindner 214).

Paula even thinks that Jess and Jules are a couple. When she interrupts the wedding of Jess’s sister (where Jess wears her shoes which Jules gave to her) she yells at her, “get your lesbian feet out of my shoes”. She is totally relieved when she finds out that they are not a couple. There is remarkable scene in the car between Jules and her mother. After she had found out that her daughter is heterosexual she tries to be cool about homosexuality. The viewers have the feeling that for her homosexuality is no problem as long as she is in no way “affected” by it. Paula even tries to make her point by stating that she had nothing against lesbianism and had even cheered for Martina Navratilova (who is a lesbian).

4.4.6 Reception Theory The current model of reception theory comprises a “collection of models, practices, and heuristics that are concerned with historicized and active responses by readers and viewers as opposed to intended meaning by authors and filmmakers” (Branigan and Buckland 390). Whereas formalist theory looks at the structure and the technical elements of a film, reception theory is concerned with the reception of a film by its viewers at specific times and for specific contexts. It assumes that a film makes a different impression depending on who watches it at

67 what specific time in history. With reception theory, the audience and the individual viewer is placed in context “taking into account all of the various factors that might influence how she or he will read and create meaning from the text”15.

Bend it Like Beckham is a very good example for students to experience reception theory. It makes a difference whether a boy or a girl watches the film. Furthermore, reception of the film is different depending whether the boy or the girl is into football or does not do any sport. Indian culture is also a topic that can be seen differently by different people. Maybe a student knows an Indian family and is friends with them. Another person may have had experiences with the Indian culture. It is beneficial for the students to see a movie under the light of reception theory. It can serve as an eye-opener for different points of view and underlying assumptions about the world around us.

4.5 Activities for using Bend it Like Beckham in school Having followed the four steps that were suggested for analysing and interpreting films, enables students to talk about films in a thorough manner. It is the aim of this chapter, to split up the steps within the analysing process into manageable teaching units and tasks. Several publications have suggested pedagogical activities for Bend it Like Beckham to be used in English language teaching. For example, Hildebrand et al. (2007) provide materials concerning the main characters, the table of sequence, analysis of key scenes as well as a teacher’s manual and class tests. They also compiled a vocabulary list for each activity at the end of the publication. Another very good resource is by Anslinger and van Els (2005) who have compiled a teaching resource consisting of four different components (stereotypes, Jesminder between two idols, children and parents, and Asians in Great Britain) which offers a wide range of texts and activities to be used in teaching Bend it Like Beckham in an upper form of a Gymnasium.

When using films in schools it is always necessary to give students activities while watching. Otherwise there is a risk that the students do not pay enough attention to the language they should get familiar with. Even though the following activities are grouped according to a specific topic, in most cases more than one skill is practised that also reaches out beyond the respective topic. As stated earlier, watching films in English teaching can help students improve

15 http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Reception-Theory.html (2.4.2018). 68 all the four skills. For the Matura, teachers have to provide students who want to do the oral exam with a list of topics they have to be familiar with. Those topics are the ones that are dealt with during the four school years leading up to the Matura. Even though the topics are mainly targeted at the oral exam, they can be seen as a summary or umbrella topics for what was done in the entire upper form. The following sub-headings are part of the list (cf. the chapter on skills tested in the oral Matura) and thus relevant for the written as well as the oral part of the Matura. The following activities are grouped according to the respective topic(s). Comparisons students should make, especially when it comes to culture(s), always concern their own Austrian as well as British and Indian culture.

4.5.1 Intercultural aspects Even though we live in a globalised world in which country, language and cultural boundaries merge, there is still something like a local culture (peculiarities that can only be found in a particular area of the world). What then – if they really exist – are the particularities of the English? There seems to be no doubt that there are certain cultural peculiarities in England. Paxman ascribes them to the fact that Brits live on an island. For him “geography matters; it makes people who they are.” (3)

4.5.1.1 Social groups – ethnic identity/integration The film offers great opportunities to teach different cultures and all the challenges that might come with it. It is a topic that lies within the realms of students’ experiences and thus makes it authentic and motivational. In order to use Bend it Like Beckham for the teaching of ethnic identity and integration under the main topic of social groups, I propose the following activities which could be done within project and/or group work.

Taks 1 1. Watch the film (or selected scenes) and fill in the grid.

In what way does the Bhamra family want to keep their Indian identity?

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What efforts of integration of the Bhamra family do you see?

2. Try to come up with a list (maybe you have to go to your townhall/mayor) of ethnic minorities living in your village/town. 3. Use your list of minorities and make a diagram out of the data. Write a report in which you explain the data and write about the situation of minorities in your village/town. 4. Try to find out what kind of integration programs and actions are taken in your village/town. Come up with suggestions to further improve the integration of migrants in your home town/village. 5. Together with your teacher, come up with a curriculum for a language course for migrants. Teach them ….. (the language that is spoken in the respective country) and write down where major problems occurred (concerning the language as well as the culture).

4.5.1.2 Football The English are obsessed with games – especially football. Maybe this is because “almost all of the most popular sports and games played around the world today originated in England” (Fox 239). Football, baseball, rugby and tennis were invented in England. For many other sports the English were the first to write down official rules. Sports and games are an integral part of British culture and this is obvious right from the beginning of Bend it Like Beckham. The film has not even started properly but while the intro is shown, a sport reporter is talking about David Beckham and Manchester United. Before the students start their work (individually or in pair/group work), the teacher should explain the two idioms “to find the missing piece of the jigsaw” and “to reach a peak”.

Task 2 (football): What significance does football have in British culture? - Who is David Beckham and why is he so popular?

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- Try to find out how many people usually go to a football match on match day in the English Premier League and compare your findings with Austrian football. Draw a graph with your findings. - Write a report about your findings and speculate why football is so important in the UK.

Task 3 (lead-in): Students watch the first two minutes of the film. As a lead-in activity the students should: - give reasons why a girl is playing football with David Beckham - speculate what the film is about - make assumptions how the story will unfold.

Task 4 (different accents): Students should use transcript 116 and find out: - who the three sport commentators are who are depicted at the beginning of the film. - what accents they have - what is meant by “World Cup glory” - what the football terms mean that are used in transcript 1 The football terms could also be discussed in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) context. As an example, students could bring along their vocabulary sheet to their physical education lessons and demonstrate what the words mean.

Task 5 (football broadcasting): Students are asked to watch different scenes of English and Austrian football matches on YouTube. Afterwards, they should compare football broadcasting in the two countries. Outcomes could be class discussions, posters or a written text.

4.5.2 Social groups (minorities – Indians in the United Kingdom) British Indians are the single largest visible ethnic minority population in England17. The term refers to citizens of the United Kingdom who were either born in the UK or have roots in India. Within British society they are primarily members of the middle class and usually live in big

16 See page 95 in the Appendix. 17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian 71 communities within large cities. They have a huge impact on British culture – especially on food. “Indian food in particular is now an integral part of English culture. Our customs revolve around it. No Saturday night pub-crawl would be complete without a visit to the local Tandoori or Balti restaurant. And when the English go on holiday abroad, the food they most miss, according to the latest surveys, is not fish and chips or steak-and-kidney pie but ‘a proper English curry’” (Fox 301).

When dealing with Indian communities in England, who very easy and straightforward grids to use as lead-in activities could look like this18:

Task 6 (expressions of culture): Jess occupies a place between the English and the Sikh culture. What expressions of Sikh and English culture do you see in the film?

English culture Sikh culture

Task 7 (acculturation to British culture): Jess also experiences acculturation to the British culture. What evidence of such an acculturation by Jess or her family do you notice?

Character Evidence of Acculturation

18 Adapted from Algeo, Katie. “Teaching Cultural Goegraphy with Bend It Like Beckham”. Journal of Geography, 106, 2007, 140-141. 72

Task 8: As Indian food is an important issue in the film, students should note down what kind of food they see and on what occasions food is shown in the film. They should answer the question who cooks the meal(s) in the English as well as the Indian families. If they have problems understanding the names of the food items, they should look them up in the transcript of the film19. As the entire transcript needs to be read, this could be done in group work. Once the students have come up with the terms, they should look them up in a dictionary and describe the dishes briefly. Furthermore, the students should: - list those ingredients that are unfamiliar to them and compile a glossary with the unfamiliar terms - find out what the prototypical Indian dish is and what ingredients are used for it - recommend certain dishes to their group members and explain their choice - analyse what significance food/eating has in English compared to Indian families

Task 9 (traditional clothes): The Indian families are often shown in their traditional clothes. Students should find out what traditional Indian clothes look like and on what occasions people wear them. They should write an article about it.

Task 10 (arranged marriages): Arranged marriages play an important role when discussing intercultural aspects in school. Most Austrian teenagers might not be familiar with the concept as luckily it does not affect them. The situation, however, is different for other cultures. Girls in other countries and cultures are still promised to a prospective husband and are not allowed to find a husband themselves. Their families arrange a suitable husband for them. This issue is also shown in the film. The viewers get the first glimpse of if at minute 7:00 in the film when Jess sits in her bedroom, looks at her poster of David Beckham and talks to herself: “I nearly scored from 25 yards today. Bent it and everything. I could have carried on playing all night. It’s not fair that boys never have to come home and help. If I get an arranged marriage, would I get someone who’d let me play football whenever I wanted?”

19 An example for a transcript of Bend it Like Beckham can be found under: http://www.cfg- luis.de/Lehrer/Schuett- GerhardsR/Englisch/Jahrgangsstufe%2011/&download=Bend+it+like+beckham+script.pdf (7.4.2018). 73

The general topic of marriage is part of the oral Matura in English. Students should be able to compare and contrast Austrian marriages with marriages in other cultures. The film helps to get some insight into a different culture and its marriage rites and traditions. Taking the quote as a starting point, students should research what an arranged marriage means for girls, whether it only affects girls (or boys as well) and in which countries marriages are arranged. If there are students in school who come from different cultures, students could interview them and try to find out how marriages are organised in their respective cultures.

4.5.3 Tradition and Change 4.5.3.1 Religion Religion does not play a very important role in English society. Fox even states that “religion as such is largely irrelevant to the lives of most English people nowadays” and that funerals, weddings and, to some lesser extent baptisms, are for the majority the only contact with church (353). Moreover, religion is a rather private matter in the United Kingdom. People do not openly speak about their religion or demonstrate openly that they are in some way or the other religious. The situation is different with Indian people. In Bend it Like Beckham it becomes obvious that Jess’ family is very religious. They have a big picture of their Sikh deity in the living-room and especially Mrs. Bhamra often refers to her god. She prays to him that he puts some sense into her daughter to stop the “nonsense” of playing football.

Task 11: Certain scenes of the film could be the starting point for a cross-curricular project between English and Religious Education. In group work, students do research on religious prominent in Austria, the United Kingdom and India. They compile word lists with typical expressions and each group holds a presentation about one religion.

4.5.4 The role of women Jess and Jules are portrayed as being totally different than “normal” girls. They do not seem to fit into the gender role that society expects of them. Here the film works with the prejudice that girls love to style themselves, use make-up and dress in short skirts. Girls are supposed to admire boys/men who are athletic. They want to be the beautiful accessory next to them. At minute 9:34 the viewers see acquaintances of Jess sitting on a park bench watching the soccer game. English girls love to dress very sexily. When teenagers go out on weekends they wear

74 very short skirts and a lot of make-up. This is not the kind of dress that would be suitable in Indian society.

Task 12: Students should compare and contrast the way Jules and Jess (and the other football girls) with girls in the film who do not play football (e.g. Jess’ sister, Jess’ female friends).

4.5.4.1 Prejudices – social groups The film is full of prejudices. The most frequently seen prejudice is the one concerning traditional roles of men and women and mostly centres around the issue that a girl wants to become a professional football player. At minute 14:55 Jule’s mother is shocked because her daughter is playing football in the garden. She absolutely does not understand that Jules behaves like a boy and cannot understand her husband either, “Alan, when are you gonna realise you have a daughter with breasts, not a son?” In the same scene she is worried about the future of her daughter, “No boy’s gonna want to go out with a girl who’s got bigger muscles than him!”. One of the prejudices is that girls cannot play football let alone Indian girls. Joe, coach of the women’s team, is surprised by Jess’ football skills. He is not prejudiced against girls playing football (otherwise he would not work as a coach for a girls’ team) but he says, “I’ve never seen an Indian girl into football”. This highlights even more, what it must mean for Jess’ family to find out that she is obsessed with football.

4.5.5 Living – housing In most schoolbooks for English, living and housing conditions in the United Kingdom are a separate unit. The style of houses is a lot different in the two countries and students should be made aware of how people live and how important houses and gardens are for them. Fox notes that in the United Kingdom “the residential areas consist almost entirely of rows and rows of small boxes, each with its own tiny patch of green” because “the English all want to live in their own private little box with their own private little green bit” (111). Connected with this is the fact that house numbers are rather confusing and, in many cases, well-hidden as the English are obsessed with privacy. They love to improve their houses and their gardens.

Usually, English schoolbooks display the different types of houses and students have to learn the respective vocabulary. However, to watch detached houses or semi-detached houses and well-groomed little gardens in films is a different story. In Bend it Like Beckham, for example, 75

Jess’ and Jule’s houses are shown from the outside as well as the inside. The viewers get a feeling for the living conditions or middle-class people in the United Kingdom.

Task 13: Watch Bend it Like Beckham and stop the film whenever houses or gardens are shown. Describe them in as much detail as possible and speculate what importance they have for the respective families. List those elements (actions, content of dialogues, designs, colours, decorations, etc.) that according to you show how important the house or the garden is.

4.5.6 School and education School, especially comparisons between the school systems of the United Kingdom, the USA and Austria, is an important topic in English language teaching. Students should become aware of the differences in the systems which are mostly reflected by historical or cultural developments. Even though school does only play a marginal role, it is nevertheless worth mentioning to the students. The detail in question concerns the way exam results are published in the different countries. Whereas in Austria, students are informed by their teachers about the exams of the written exams about two weeks after the exam (and immediately after their oral performances), students in England need to wait for an official letter with the respective results. Furthermore, in England students have to have a certain mark in order to be eligible for studying particular subjects at university. In Austria, this is not the case. Though for some subjects students have to take an entry exam.

Task 14: Students should find out what a “numerus clausus” is. They should organise a debate in which they talk about the pros and cons of an admission restriction at universities.

4.5.7 Personal future This topic is in English lessons mostly associated with the possibility of taking a gap year. School books report about a year abroad and how students can benefit for their future careers as well as their personal development. Furthermore, students are supposed to talk about the advantages and drawbacks of different jobs. It would be interesting to talk about job alternatives that do not follow the traditional male or female roles or job descriptions.

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Task 15: Imagine you are Jess’ father or mother and have just found out about her football ambitions. What would you tell her? Write down key words and hold this “speech” in front of your classmates.

Task 16: Imagine you are a career advisor and Jess comes to you for advice. You talk to her and inform her about the positive aspects as well as the risks of becoming a professional female footballer.

4.6 Linguistic and grammatical features Apart from dealing with the pool of topics, students also learn and practise linguistic and grammatical features by watching popular films in English. The biggest advantage of the film in this context is the authenticity of dialogues that learners hear and experience.

4.6.1 Phrasal verbs and idioms Phrasal verbs and idioms are included in every English schoolbook. Problematic is the fact that students need to learn them by heart and are not really motivated to learn word lists. Phrasal verbs and idioms are very important for the Matura, as students need to demonstrate that they know different registers and are able to use colloquial language. Furthermore, phrasal verbs as well as idioms are part of the LIU part of the written Matura. Students have to fill in, for example, appropriate phrasal verbs or are given a verb and need to add the correct preposition in order for the given sentence to make sense. Naturally, there are many phrasal verbs and idioms used in Bend it Like Beckham. It is more motivating for students to deal with these grammar topics by analysing a film than just learning various word lists.

Task 17: As a starting point, students get the very first lines of the film transcript where the audience sees a Manchester United match and hears the commentator. This text is quite fast and most students will not understand everything that is said. Therefore, they are given the transcript and are asked to mark the phrasal verbs that they can spot. Ideally, the students should come up with the phrasal verbs take over, break through, break forward and shrug off. After having talked about these words and having figured out what they mean, the students should get together in small groups. Each group gets certain pages of the script and should mark the phrasal verbs in them. They should provide a translation, a definition as well as – if possible – the 77 standard English word that is synonymous to the phrasal verbs. A similar task can be done for dealing with idioms.

4.6.2 Different registers Even though students are expected to use different registers for the Matura (e.g. talking to a teacher or a friend), it is not easy for them to actively use words that belong to a particular register. In English lessons teachers always point out whether a word is formal or informal but if students do not immerse in the language they will find it very hard to actively use a specific register. Moreover, for teachers it is difficult to make distinctions clear. Students really have to hear the language and experience it in order to fully understand it.

Task 18: A very good example of different registers is found in Bend it Like Beckham. There is a huge difference in Joe’s language use depending on who he is talking to. He talks in a different register when he visits Jess’ parents and tries to convince them that Jess has a future as a professional football player and when he talks to the girls during training sessions. Students should watch minute 42:00 of the film and compare the language to the one used during training sessions.

4.7 Using Bloom’s Taxonomy Like in every lesson, students might not all work with the same pace or motivation for the topic. Normally, watching film motivates the majority of students but some differentiation should be included in teaching. Even though it might not be absolutely necessary in an upper form of a grammar school, it contributes to individualisation of the teaching process and serves the needs of the very gifted students. Whereas in lower forms or comprehensive schools differentiation is done in order to cater for the different intellectual needs of the students, in an upper form it means that the students can choose activities according to their interests and skills. Especially towards the Matura, the individual students need to practice different skills. A very good way of making sure that each student gets the maximum out of the teaching process, is the application of Bloom’s taxonomy. Gifted children are the supposed clientele of an upper form of a grammar school. For them differentiation means providing them “with different materials, tasks, and activities than their age peers – tasks that lead to authentic learning for them” (Winebrenner 6).

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Benjamin S. Bloom was an American professor for psychology whose special interest was the domain of learning. As a result of educational conferences, a book was published in 1956 that was edited by Bloom and was called Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. A second handbook was published in 1964. The book summarised Boom’s taxonomy which is “a hierarchy of processes ranging from the simple to the complex” (Gershon 14-15). The processes are ordered according to their level of difficulty – from lower order thinking skills to higher order thinking skills (HOTS). They were revised in 2001. The lowest level of difficulty is remembering, followed by understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and the most difficult level being creating. These verbs can only be seen as umbrella terms for a lot more tasks that students have to perform. Even though Bloom’s taxonomy provides a great tool for high quality teaching and learning tasks, it no longer seems to be sufficient for the 21st century. Media literacy has become the buzzword of our time and this is why in 2008 Churches20 adapted Bloom’s taxonomy for the digital age which should also be applied when teaching with and about new media as well as film. Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy looks like this:

Creating Designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making Evaluating Checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring Analysing Comparing, organising, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating Applying Implementing, carrying out, using, executing Understanding Interpreting, summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying Remembering Recognising, listening, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding

The first task for the monologue of the oral Matura – comparing and contrasting two pictures – would classify as a lower-order thinking skill. The two following tasks are taken from higher- order thinking skills and have thus to do with analysing and/or evaluating. It can also be – as the digital taxonomy suggests – applied to films and is especially useful as post-reading tasks. Among such tasks could be: diagrams (e.g. draw a diagram of different nationalities living in your town), recipes (e.g. write down the recipe of one Indian dish that is mentioned in the film) or creative products (e.g. a poem).

20 Churches, Andrews. Curriculum Manager Computer Studies & Senior School Learning Innovator, http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/About+Me 79

5 Conclusion As mentioned in the introduction, a lot of studies exist that deal with particular features of films and how they can contribute to the enhancement of those skills learned in English language teaching. It was the aim of this thesis to show that film does not only increase the motivation of the students but is a great means to equip students with many of the skills that are needed for the Austrian school-leaving exam in an “Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schule”. The Matura was drastically changed in 2004. Due to the Bologna process, qualifications needed to be comparable across Europe. The change of the national curriculum saw a shift away from the knowledge-based towards a skills-based and communicative curriculum as well as the introduction of the CEFR. Now students need to pass a centralised exam with a parity of the four skills. Most of the Austrian students sit the written exam in English. Many of them additionally opt for the oral English exam. The three-pillar system states that there is also a pre- academic written work – the Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit – which can be written in English.

Basis for the written as well as the oral exam in English are the topics dealt with during the four years of upper form. The written part tests the four skills divided into a receptive (reading and listening) and a productive (language in use and text writing) part. The reading tasks consist of three different texts with different test formats. The skill of reading was in the past often considered rather passive but his view has changed dramatically. Reading is seen as a way of improving the communicative competence of the students. Furthermore, the vocabulary of a reader is always far smaller as that of the author. As soon as the reader decodes the meaning of the text, reading becomes an active process. It should always be the aim of a teacher to use real- life reading texts that are motivating for the students. Motivation is also important, as reading texts are in many cases the basis for learning other skills, like pronunciation, vocabulary or language structure. The benefits of watching popular films for the acquisition of reading skills occur on different levels. One example is Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory and another is the simple fact that students become experienced readers of the target language by following the subtitles of the film. Furthermore, Vetrie states that students who acquire listening, speaking and writing skills through watching films improve their reading and writing skills as well (42). Reading as a skill is nowadays not limited to written texts. Film literacy has demonstrated that reading also refers to the moving image. Text is thus seen as the written as well as the audio- visual text. Thus, reading a movie improves the students’ ability to read all kinds of texts.

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The second part of the written exam is listening. This skill is tested because researchers have found out that listening encompasses about 40 % of the time during an average day. It is thus an essential skill that students must have. Like reading, listening was considered a passive skill but the acquisition of the skill of listening is a vital prerequisite of good speaking ability. In English lessons, students mostly listen to the (non-native) teacher. Additionally, every school book comes with a CD with recordings by English native-speakers. As listening to audio recordings can sometimes be a daunting tasks, audio-visual materials are a good supplement. Listening activities are often the starting point for various discussions. For the Matura, students need to be able to understand three recordings of various degrees of difficulty in which background noises and people who talk in different accents are included. They always have to listen without seeing the person speaking. Moreover, by watching films students have the chance to listen to different sociolects of the target language as well as different people interacting (e.g. children, non-native speakers, etc.).

Language in use is part of the productive part of the written Matura. It is a combination of vocabulary and grammar. Students need to show that they have a good command of the structural and lexical range as well as orthographic control of the English language. Basis of the assessment of LIU are authentic texts taken from various sources. The tasks are challenging for the students are they test word classes, word families, word formation and collocations. LIU exercises do not test grammar in the traditional way of single grammar units but by filling in missing words or phrases into a cloze text.

Naturally, the most challenging part for students is text writing. They have to write one long text of about 400 words and one shorter text of about 250 words. Text types include essays, articles, reports, blogs and formal/informal emails. For the different tasks they have to use an appropriate register. Especially for emails they have to distinguish between formal and informal language. Thus, popular films can help them to see the differences in the registers and apply them accordingly. Furthermore, popular films always elicit various emotions in the viewers. Emotions that are triggered by watching films might be the starting point for engaging students in authentic speaking and writing activities.

For the oral English exam students have to deliver a short speech in form of a monologue and have a conversation with either the teacher or a peer. Basis are again the topics dealt with in the upper form of grammar school. For the oral exam teachers need to assess the language of the

81 students according to the criteria task achievement, fluency and interaction, range of spoken language and accuracy of spoken language. Pronunciation as well as the pragmatic and cultural knowledge of the students is part of the assessment as well.

Within communicative and authentic language teaching it is important that students are able to express themselves without problems. One means of teaching them communicative competence is using films in the language classroom. Before the Matura reform it was more important to express oneself in writing and to analyse literary texts. As these are skills that are normally only used in an academic context, it has now become important to understand people speaking English and being understood. In a conversation with a native speaker it is essential to have knowledge about the target culture in order to respect e.g. forms of politeness. There is a limit to the teaching of culture and intercultural skills within a traditional teaching context. This is why it is essential to expose the students to English (or any other native English) culture. As travelling to an English-speaking country is only possible as an exception (and in most cases only for about one week), the best options teachers have, are films. In that way, students are immersed into the culture and pick up – even in some cases unconsciously – elements and issues of English culture.

In the past, a film would be shown as a time-filler towards the end of the semester. Fortunately, this view has changed of the last years and educators have realised the potential of films for the acquisition of various skills. Using popular films in the English language classroom first and foremost increases the motivation of the learners. It is debatable, however, whether films that do not appeal to the students also contribute to a better motivation for the subject. In case teachers still have to defend themselves why they show a popular film in class, Thaler has given all pedagogues great arguments for films in English language teaching (19-20):

Rationale References Popularity and motivation “Video is toady’s medium” (Sherman 2001:2) Audio-visual appeal “If it moves they will watch it” (Andy Warhol) Authenticity “People want access to the world of English-language media (Sherman 2001:2) Personal relevance “There is no biography without the cinema (Hellmuth Karasek)

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Receptive competences (listening, viewing) “To learn to speak to people they must see and hear people speaking to each other “ (Sherman 2001:14) Productive competences (speaking, writing, “Media-transmitted content, in particular, mediating) evokes the need to think, feel, judge, and act on one’s own” (Erdmenger 1989:130) Intertextual-literary competences Film on book or book on film - Surkamp (2004) Intercultural learning Film as “moving picture book” (Sherman 2001:3) Media/film literacy “…the formal, functional and aesthetic categories of media formats….” (Thaler 2007)

Apart from these reasons, popular films should also be shown in English language teaching because they help students acquire and practise all the skills they need for their Matura. It is in most cases very hard for learners to distinguish between formal and informal or colloquial language. Teachers can try to teach this distinction through explanations or chosen written or audio examples. However, it is best conveyed when students also see the body language and gestures of people involved in an actual conversation. Grammar items and specific vocabulary are experienced in a realistic context and not in form of word lists that need to be learned by heart and without minimal context. Moreover, words also need to be pronounced and intonated correctly. In traditional language teaching it is not possible that every single student gets the chance to pronounce the words that occur during a lesson. Even though the teacher tries to point the students’ attention to “difficult” words, not necessarily every student will be able to pronounce the words correctly. Watching films where words occur in authentic speech might contribute to a better pronunciation on part of the students.

A lot of positive aspects of showing popular films in English language teaching have been presented so far. It should not be denied, however, that there are also some challenges involved. The biggest challenge of showing films in the language classroom is the time factor. Lessons only last for 45 to 50 minutes and a film runs for about 90 (or even more) minutes. Teachers are faced with the dilemma of either not showing films at all or showing them with quite a few problems that might occur. One option would be to show the film in small portions a few consecutive lessons. The drawback is that students lose the context and do not experience the film as it should be. Another option would be to show the film in its entirety but then teachers would need to swap lessons and this might not please some colleagues. Furthermore, there might be a language conflict. Students might not be accustomed to watching authentic material

83 and their language level might be lower than the level of the language spoken in the film. Teachers can solve this problem by adapting the films to the learners’ levels or given the students pre-viewing activities that help them understand the most important unknown words. It is the responsibility of the teacher to make sure that students can enjoy films that are appropriate for their language level. There is no single solution to the time challenge in school. However, it is worth facing the challenge and finding a solution that suites everyone involved rather than not showing films at all.

When showing a film, every teacher is confronted with the question of whether to include subtitles and if so, whether they should be in the mother tongue or in the target language. For lower-level students subtitles in the mother tongue might be a good option as they do not understand most of the words spoken. For higher-level students the subtitles should be in English which has the added benefit that listening as well as reading skills are fostered at the same time. Furthermore, having the scaffolding option of subtitles avoids demotivation of students who cannot follow fast-paced conversations in films. Another benefit of subtitles is that students can follow the spelling as well as the pronunciation of words at the same time. This is important as spelling and pronunciation of English words can differ greatly. Drawbacks could be that learners concentrate too much on reading the subtitles and pay too little attention to what is happening in the film.

There is no denying that we live in a digital age in which media of all kind takes a prominent role in our lives. Especially young people use their mobile phones wherever and whenever they possibly can. It is important that we teach them how to use the technical devices as well as make them aware of how information is conveyed in the various media. Some decades ago it was important that children were literate. This does not suffice any more. They additionally have to be media literate. As this thesis only deals with the medium film, I argue that film literacy as one part of media literacy needs to be taught in schools. Film literacy is complex and consists of different components which are at play when analysing films.

The practical example chosen for this thesis is Bend it Like Beckham. It is suggested that for an analysis in English language teaching, four steps are followed. The first step is the analysis of the plot, the second one the analysis of the characters and the third step is concerned with the technical elements of the film that manage to evoke certain feelings in the viewers. What is even more challenging for the students is the analysis of the ideology or the message of the

84 film. Step four is concerned with the various film theories under which each film can be viewed. In traditional language lessons works of literature were analysed. This is now gradually replaced by the analysis of moving images. However, the theory behind the analysing process as well as the theories that should be applied are largely the same as those for literary works. Showing films and the subsequent analysis and interpretation teaches students to view alleged facts in a different light. Applied to Bend it Like Beckham this means that the film can be interpreted as a romantic teenage story, or as a representation of different classes of society, or as a feminist film to name just a few examples. Even though students should be taught how to interpret a concrete film, the actual knowledge they should gain needs to go beyond that. They should become aware that even alleged facts can differ depending under which light and from which perspective they are looked at. This can help the students when writing their essay for the Matura or giving their opinion on a certain topic during their oral exams.

The last part of this thesis presents various tasks for those Matura topics that are relevant when dealing with Bend it Like Beckham. The film can be used in English lessons in order to prepare students for the topics or living, clothing and fashion, nutrition and health, sports, school and education, tradition and change and personal future. The three topics tradition and change, intercultural aspects as well as social groups can be dealt with in even more detail as they make up a great part of the film.

This thesis has tried to demonstrate that showing films in the English language classroom can, contribute a lot to most of the skills needed for the Austrian Matura. It is therefore worthwhile for teachers to face possible challenges and overcome obstacles when showing popular films in the classroom. Additionally, popular films can manage to teach young people knowledge that goes beyond what is needed for school. As it is the duty of teachers to make students fit for their whole life – and not just for single skills – it is therefore “no longer enough to simply read and write. Students must also become literate in the understanding of visual images. Our children must learn how to spot a stereotype, isolate a social cliché, and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from banter, and important news from coverage” (Ernest Boyer).21 Even though we have come a long way from seeing film as pure entertainment, there is still work to do to convince every teacher that films needs to be an integral part in any language teaching.

21 Ernest Boyer, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Baker. Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom, 2016, 19. 85

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7 Appendix

Assessment Scale for the oral exam

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Assessment scale for the written exam

Assessment Scale B2 B2 Task Achievement* B2 Organisation and Layout

(1) Requirements of set task type fully observed (2) Title / subject line / section headings / salutation / closing appropriate and precise (3) All content points addressed and fully developed (4) Relevant supporting details / examples are provided for all content points (1) Performance has a very clear overall structure at the text level (5a) Evaluates different ideas / facts / graphs or solutions to a problem very (2) Highly effective use of paragraphing (3) Develops points in a very clear and systematic way well TSD** 10 10 (4) Marks relationships between ideas in a very clear way (5b) Explains advantages / disadvantages very well TSD (5) Uses a wide variety of linking devices (5c) Gives very good reasons in support of / against points of view TSD (6) Follows standard layout for required task type throughout (visual) (5d) Successfully and convincingly highlights the personal significance of events / ideas TSD (5e) Expresses news and views effectively and relates convincingly to those of others TSD (6) Set word length (+/- 10 %) observed 9 9

(1) Requirements of set task type almost fully observed (2) Title / subject line / section headings / salutation / closing appropriate (3) All content points addressed but one or two not fully developed (4) Relevant supporting details / examples provided for most content (1) Performance has a clear overall structure at the text level points (2) Good use of paragraphing (5a) Evaluates different ideas / facts / graphs or solutions to a problem well TSD (3) Develops points systematically 8 (5b) Explains advantages / disadvantages well TSD 8 (4) Most relationships between ideas marked (5c) Gives good reasons in support of / against points of view TSD (5) Uses a variety of linking devices (5d) Successfully highlights the personal significance of events / ideas TSD (6) Follows standard layout for required task type throughout (visual) (5e) Expresses news and views effectively and relates well to those of others TSD (6) Set word length (+/- 10 %) observed 7 7

(1) Requirements of set task type mainly observed (2) Title / subject line / section headings / salutation / closing meaningful and adequately worded (3) Two out of three content points addressed, one of which may not be fully developed / all content points addressed, but none fully developed (1) Performance has a satisfactory overall structure at the text level (4) Relevant supporting details / examples generally provided (2) Generally follows paragraphing conventions (5a) Some attempts to evaluate different ideas / facts / graphs TSD (3) Develops points largely systematically (4) Some relationships between ideas marked 6 (5b) Explains advantages / disadvantages adequately TSD 6 (5) Uses a limited number of linking devices (5c) Gives some reasons in support of / against points of view TSD (6) Has produced clearly intelligible continuous writing (5d) Highlights the personal significance of events / ideas TSD (7) Follows standard layout for required task type most of the time (visual) (5e) Expresses news and views effectively and relates to those of others TSD (6) Set word length (+/- 10 %) observed

5 5

(1) Requirements of set task type partially observed (2) Title / subject line / section headings / salutation / closing not meaning- ful / not adequately worded / partially missing (3) Two out of three content points addressed but none fully developed / (1) Performance has inadequate overall structure at the text level sometimes makes up and develops irrelevant content points (2) Seldom follows paragraphing conventions (4) Not enough relevant supporting details provided / supporting details (3) Links only shorter, simple elements into a connected linear sequence 4 sometimes irrelevant or include irrelevant information 4 (4) Only a few relationships between ideas marked (5a) Poor attempts to evaluate different ideas / facts / graphs TSD (5) Only some simple linking devices used (5b) Poor attempts to explain advantages / disadvantages TSD (6) Has difficulty in producing clearly intelligible continuous writing (5c) Gives poor reasons in support of / against points of view TSD (7) Follows standard layout for required task type only some of the time (visual) (5d) Fails to highlight the personal significance of events / ideas TSD (5e) Little / no attempt to express news and views effectively TSD (6) Set word length (+/- 10 %) not observed

3 3 (1) Requirements of set task type not observed (2) Title / subject line / section headings / salutation / closing not included (3) Only one content point addressed / hardly any content points devel- oped / frequently makes up and develops irrelevant content points (4) Hardly any relevant supporting details provided / supporting details (1) Performance has little if any structure at the text level mostly irrelevant (2) Paragraphing conventions largely ignored (5a) No attempts to evaluate different ideas / facts / graphs TSD (3) Ideas are presented in a random order without logical connections 2 2 (4) Lack of linking devices (5b) No attempts to explain advantages / disadvantages TSD (5) Lacks clearly intelligible continuous writing (5c) Gives no reasons in support of / against points of view TSD (6) Standard layout largely ignored (visual) (5d) No attempt to highlight the personal significance of events / ideas TSD (5e) Unable to express news and views effectively TSD (6) Set word length (+/- 10 %) not observed

1 1

(1) Performance fails to address the task* 0 (2) Insufficient language for assessment 0 (1) Performance shows no attempt at organisation (3) Communication fails due to illegible handwriting © Bundesinstitut für Bildungsforschung, Innovation & Entwicklung des österreichischen Schulwesens © Bundesinstitut für Bildungsforschung, Innovation & Entwicklung des österreichischen * If a test taker has written off topic, none of the other criteria will be assessed and a 0 should be awarded. ** TSD = Task specific descriptor means that this descriptor can only be applied to certain task types.

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Transcript 1

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Character Chart

Henseler et al. p. 66.

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Adjectives of Characterisation Taken from: Hildebrand et al. A lesson in movies. Bend it Like Beckham. Köln: Aulis Verlag Deubner, 2007, p. 54.

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8 Eidesstattliche Erklärung

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