Extensive listening through film 1

One problem is that so much emphasis on intensive tasks leads to a dearth of actual linguistic input in classroom interactions, especially in EFL situations. Is there a way to increase the incidental exposure of students to English, leading to higher motivation, a greater engagement with language learning activities, significantly more input and more assured language acquisition? While encouraging extensive reading by means of graded readers is widely known, less attention has been given to ways of promoting extensive listening.

This article (and the one that follows in the next issue of ETp) will explain a way to create an intensive listening library using free materials that are available online – that is, open-source and free software, public domain films, English-language scripts and multilingual subtitles. Moreover, the proposed intensive listening library can be made accessible entirely online for a taught course, a language learning lab or for independent study.

This first article will look at what extensive listening is and how it contrasts with intensive listening. Then it will explain how open-source tools and content can be obtained in order to create extensive listening materials.

Types of listening

In ELT, we think of listening as one element of the ‘four skills’, the others being speaking, reading and writing. These are the main modes of communication, so listening is considered to be a major way to practise and learn another language. A further distinction can be drawn between ‘intensive listening’ and ‘extensive listening’.

With intensive listening, the learners are asked to listen carefully to a short stretch of spoken language. Most often, they are required to catch very specific information and then recall it to answer questions (such as multiple-choice or true/false questions). They may also be asked to make inferences based on their overall understanding of the information. Additionally, the content of such listening may be used to present, exemplify and motivate the practice of specific language features, such as discrete grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary points.

In contrast, extensive listening presents more varied content in longer stretches of spoken language. Unlike intensive listening, though, it does not impose specific goals, such as recall questions or practice of explicit language features. Extensive listening is really fluent listening. It takes place everyday in our lives when we listen to a variety of content for meaning, information, communication, social participation, and even enjoyment. We do not do so in order to answer comprehension or recall questions, nor are we attending to language practice points.

The predominant type of listening that most EFL students are required to do is intensive listening, such as that done for test preparation. For many of them, there is little exposure to a wider set of listening tasks that might be useful for language learning and practice. Therefore, suggesting to students that they use the internet or broadcast media to do extensive listening often presupposes a sophistication with language learning that is outside their experience and understanding. Even if some students understand what is meant by the suggestion that they practise extensive listening, it may well not be a priority on their list of language-learning-related things to do. At best, only a few students will engage in it – and that, sporadically. Also, in an EFL environment, the dominant media are not in English, and foreign-language content is widely available in translated and dubbed versions, reducing the opportunities for most students to make effective use of English content.

While intensive tasks can be contrasted with extensive ones, there is no hard-set rule for the duration of intensive listening versus extensive. Normally, intensive listening materials do not exceed a few minutes – for example, one of the academic listening questions found in the TOEFL exam. On the other hand, activities based on intensive listening material, such as comprehension questions, vocabulary and grammar explanations, etc, might take up an entire lesson. That is, the time spent on instruction and tasks for intensive listening typically exceeds the time used for actual listening.

Nor is there a set rule for what length of text equates to extensive listening. However, high-beginner-level students, for example, will probably struggle with intensive listening if the duration of the listening material exceeds four minutes. So we might somewhat arbitrarily set extensive listening tasks at five minutes or more.

Spontaneous versus scripted language

There are a number of different possibilities for using scripted language and spontaneous communication in educational settings. Indeed, they might even be used together – such as when the students ask a professor questions about a topic during a lecture that is being given by the professor from written lecture notes. However, it is useful to view them separately, in order to contrast their characteristics and then apply them to listening.

Many people trying to learn a foreign language want to be able to understand spontaneous, real-time oral communication and want to participate in conversations and discussions. However, such communication employs gestures and body language, colloquial vocabulary, and higher-level semantics and pragmatics, all of which can overwhelm language learners. Spontaneous speech also tends to be elided, co-articulated and delivered at rates over 150 words per minute (especially among speakers who know each other well and who are discussing a shared interest).

Written English tends to be lexico-semantically dense and strung out in longer clauses and sentences. On the other hand, it typically displays much more predictable grammar and vocabulary. In materials for EFL learners, the language of reading texts and scripted listening tasks is carefully selected and simplified, with more limited word choice and structure. The language can even be chosen or created in order to target particular language features, such as the grammar and vocabulary specified on a syllabus. When English is read aloud formally, it is typically given strong, even dramatic, accentuation and emphasis. This is quite different from the fast, relaxed pronunciation of spontaneous oral communication.

Using narrative films for language learning can be a nice compromise between the heavy demands of spontaneous language and the artificiality of the scripted language of teaching materials. Film characters, situations and dialogue are still highly scripted. However, typically, for them to be engaging, they have to mimic the naturalistic aspects of extemporaneous everyday speech and oral language among real people in social situations. Also, in most cases, the language is practical and reflects the sort of language we use every day. Our repeated analysis of corpora of narrative films indicates that they correlate very well with various lists of the most frequent words of English.

Films in the public domain

Public domain films are those on which the copyrights have expired, so their viewing, copying and distribution fall under far fewer controls and restrictions. In the US, works of cinematography, including feature films, are protected by an initial copyright period of 95 years. This means that public domain films in the US tend to be either very old or later films that no one had properly asserted copyright over when they were first released. Two examples of the latter are the classics Charade (starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant) and McLintock! (starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara), both of which were released in 1963.

The situation in Japan is quite a bit different from that in the US. Cinematographic content in Japan was originally given an initial copyright period of 50 years. Then, in 2004, that period was extended by law to 75 years. However, courts in Japan ruled that the new 75-year period could not be retroactively applied. This meant that many pre-1953 films, both Japanese and foreign films distributed in Japan, are considered to be in the public domain there. We point this out in order to advise teachers to learn what the copyright laws are and what constitutes fair use for classrooms in their own countries.

Sources of public domain films

If a teacher wishes to use public domain films as teaching material, the first possible source to consider is content which has been recorded privately, from TV broadcasts. Another source is legacy optical discs like VCD, DVD and the more modern BD. These have content that is already digitised. However, it may have to be decrypted and stripped of regional coding before it can be re-encoded to a format that is usable online for streaming and downloading. In Japan, in the first decade of the 21st century, DVD publishers took advantage of the 50-year copyright law and released many DVDs of western films as public domain, even though that status was being disputed by foreign media conglomerates. Such DVDs are a valuable resource for teachers in Japan, because they almost always contain Japanese subtitles as well as English ones.

Online sources

Cinematographic content in the public domain is now widely available online. For example, there are many channels at the popular online video-sharing platforms YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo which stream such content. Less famous, but perhaps the most useful for obtaining videos for educational use, are Internet Archive (https://archive.org) and Public Domain Tube (www.publicdomaintube.org). Downloading content from these two sites never violates hidden user agreement clauses. Moreover, no special software or site is required for downloading from Internet Archive – it typically makes the content available for download in the popular, online-friendly MP4 and OGG formats.

Teachers could simply assign videos at such sites for their students to view, but most teachers will want a more structured approach and a more controlled environment for their students. In order to make a collection of films, video files playable on PCs, tablets and smartphones can be extracted from commercial DVDs and BDs or downloaded from online archives. One important issue is centralised storage of the files. It is convenient to store the video files (about 800 MB to 1 GB per film) in the ‘cloud’, such as at Google Drive, MS OneDrive or Apple iCloud. Then students can download or stream them for their own use.

Textual support

Using films for extensive listening most importantly requires listening to and watching video. However, texts can also be used to support and enhance the content for EFL learners. The two types of texts that are the most useful are subtitles and film scripts/screenplays. With these texts, extensive reading can be used to reinforce the extensive listening.

Subtitles

One disadvantage of online video platforms is that language support with subtitles is often lacking. Meanwhile, while machine-generated captioning at YouTube has greatly improved in the past decade, it still often renders fluently-spoken English as fluently-written gibberish.

Subtitles (often also referred to as closed captions or cc) are texts based on a transcript or screenplay of the dialogue or commentary in films, television programmes, video games, etc. Typically, they are displayed at the bottom of the screen, but other placement is possible. They can be a word-for-word rendering of the actual dialogue and narration heard in the programme, or they can present a somewhat simplified paraphrase.

In order to create an extensive listening film library for students, it is essential to have good English subtitles. It can also be helpful, especially for students at the beginning level, to have subtitles in their own language(s). They can watch chunks of a film in their own language both before and after viewing the English-captioned version, in order to confirm meaning and to build an overall understanding of the story, place, characters, etc.

In many markets, foreign media are often presented with translated subtitles, thus making the content much more understandable for people who cannot speak or read the original language. A video grabber program like 4K Video Downloader can also obtain the subtitle files from platforms like YouTube. While the suffixes of subtitle files can seem exotic, the most common format, .srt files, can be opened and edited like a text file (.txt).

Since the introduction of the DVD and then BD, content from major media companies often includes subtitles and/or dubbing options for playback. In the case of both subtitles and dubbing, often the translations are not tied in too closely with the actual dialogue as it was spoken in the original language. This is especially true of dubbing, which limits its usefulness for language learning.

In addition to the 4K Video Downloader program, which can download video files and accompanying subtitle .srt files, there are also special subtitle downloader programs and websites that find and get the files. The user merely has to input the url of the video source that is associated with the required .srt files. A general search engine like Google can be used to find the files as well. Use search terms such as the exact title of the film, year, subtitles, cc, language and .srt.

There are websites that also act as both search engines and curating repositories for subtitle files, for example OpenSubtitles.org, Subscene.com and YIFY subtitles.com. There is also a Google Drive app available from OpenSubtitles.org at the Google Webstore, called Subtitle Finder With Drive. It has the added benefit of being better able to match the downloaded and saved video file with the correct subtitle file in order to avoid synchronisation issues, because it uses the ‘hash’ of the video instead of the title. Similarly, there is an extension to the popular freeware VLC Media Player that does this as well, called VLSub. Once installed, the VLC program can be used to find subtitle files that match the hash of the loaded video.

Screenplays and scripts

In addition to multilingual subtitle files, a library of video content for extensive listening can be supported with screenplays and scripts. Fortunately, English-language screenplays and scripts are easily acquired online in .html and pdf forms. A good place to start in order to find the texts is the Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb). Scripts.com has consistently been one of the best sources for film scripts in downloadable pdf format.

In this first article, we have looked at what extensive listening is and how it contrasts with intensive listening. Then we explained where to get public domain content (films and scripts) and what open-source tools can be used to adapt and present that content as extensive listening materials for students.

In the next issue of ETp, we will look specifically at how to deal with the technical issues of downloading and processing digital content. We will then give two sets of procedures:

1 How to prepare content for an extensive listening library.

2 How students can use the materials for extensive listening practice and self-study.