While it is recommended that students write reviews of their favourite films, it is also helpful if they watch a short film together in class, and then write about it. This way, we, as teachers, can explore how our learners see the same thing from different perspectives.
In this post, EFL Collective suggests “Ah Boy”, a short film your learners can watch to write a film review. It’s a Chinese 20-minute amateur film, which is directed by Kiven Lim and produced by Ginne Kek.
NB. The subtitles include some language mistakes but that doesn’t impede students’ understanding of the film.
Suggested Procedure:
Pre-viewing Stage:
You can pre-teach some vocabulary items like: poor, vulnerable, late, protect, bullies, and work. This PPT can help you. To elicit these vocabulary items, you can ask your students questions like: (1) What are some problems can students have at school? (2) What kind of students usually suffer from bullying? And (3) Why are some students usually late for school?
While-viewing Stage:
The students do exercises A and B on the worksheet.
Post-viewing Stage:
The students write a review of the film, following the outline in Exercise C.
The learners are encouraged to write a review that should more or less look like the one below:
“Ah Boy” is a Chinese short film. It’s 20 minutes long, and it’s directed by Kevin Lim.
The film is about a poor schoolboy who lives with his sick mother. His father is dead. Chen Jia Fu is socially vulnerable. He faces different difficulties in his life. However, his mum is always there to help him compose himself when he is down.
The little boy tries different jobs to help his mum. He delivers newspapers in the morning, but he usually ends up being late for school and gets scolded and punished by his teacher. He even falls asleep during classes because of the exhausting work he does outside school. Not only that but the boy also gets bullied by three of his classmates. They give him a hard time on a daily basis.
The boy dreams of becoming an athlete. That’s why he decides to work as a waiter and cleaner in a restaurant to save more money and buy new trainers. Thanks to his determination and perseverance, he participates in a marathon and wins it, defeating all his bullies.
What we can take from this film is that no matter what difficulties one faces in life, one should never give up. The film is inspirational, too. It boosts one’s self-confidence and makes us believe in ourselves.
The short Fim
