Sitcoms in the English Lessons
As I already mentioned I am a fan of movies. Some time ago I posted an article on how you can teach movies in class. I really like the idea to use movies in class because I think most of the students at school are as well into movies and like to work with them in the lessons.
The problem is that movies are quite long and it takes a lot of time to work out a whole movie with all the possible activities. The alternative is to just show a movie after you dealt with the related book without dealing with the movie itself properly. But I think this is not the best choice to make!
For these reasons I thought it is a really great alternative to work with situation comedy (sitcoms) instead of a whole movie. These sitcoms are much shorter (about 20 to 25 minutes each episode) and I made the experience that the students really like them. After the idea came to my mind I looked around a bit on the web and found out about some pretty good ideas and thoughts on how to teach sitcoms in the English classroom.
Good reasons to use them is that everybody likes to laugh and that many students watch at least a bit of television every day! Another is that students tend to be more interested into television and watching movies at a cinema than reading a book nowadays. So why shouldn’t teachers use this interest of students to support and enrich their learning process?!
Additionally, it is important to mention that there are a lot of commonalities between television and printed literature. Though each have their own ways of telling their story to the watcher/reader the main structure of the story is quite the same. In a story something occurs or happens and lead to further effects or happenings.
Another similarity between these two types of storytelling are the activities a teacher can deal with in his lessons. For example you can work on characterizations, the plot development, the setting or the mood that is produced.
But as well the additional features of sitcoms in contrast to literature, where usually only words are available to describe something, can be picked out as a central theme. These could be topics like the camera angles and their effects, body language of the actors or different moods created by music.
Along with that the students can improve their listening skills and work on their vocabulary. They also get in contact with authentic material and different varieties of the English language, for example with typical slang, locutions and sayings. And in the special situation of teaching comedy students get in contact with humorous utterances and expressions. All these features can improve the student’s understanding for the English language in a very natural and authentic way.
Body language
There are so many different opportunities and topics within sitcoms that you can work on with your students like working on their vocabulary by watching a scene and let them pick several vocab they don’t know and then discuss the vocabulary according to the meaning in general and in the context of the sitcom sequence. Another possibility is to pick scenes with humorous utterances, locutions or sayings. Let them find out the expressions and sentences they don’t understand and discuss these with your students by translating them and evaluate their meaning in the connection to the situation in the sitcom. You can as well show scenes about for example a specific holiday or other typical features of a particular country and teach aspects of culture like family issues, religion, race and ethnicity, gender issues, social issues, politics and numerous others to your students.
American holiday
All in all I think the usage of sitcoms in the English lessons would be fun and motivating for the students. It is a nice alternative in contrast to the usually used printed literature and fits more to the interests of most of the students. You just have to pick the sitcoms and particular scenes with care concerning the topic you want to work on because of possible topics like sexual allusions or swearwords which can appear to be inappropriate.
For further ideas and information check the following websites:
http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Chiu-Sitcom.html
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/building-a-lesson-around-a-sitcom
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/sitcoms-a-tool-elt
