How to train your dragon(esl- Movie critic)

How to :   Offering practical advice and detailed instruction on an activity.

ESL – Movie Critic

Show Mark Kermode’s review of; “How to Train Your Dragon”

Explain to the students that Mark Kermode is a very popular and opinionated movie critic from the UK, who is renowned for his”big flappy hands” and dreadful movie impersonations.  He is very difficult to understand as he talks very fast and this speed, along with his body language show how enthusiastic he is about movies.

This clip can be used in several ways.  Here are some suggestions:

Cloze activity, dictation, Questions about the dialogue.

What did the critics say?

Divide students into groups and allocate each group a different critics review of “how to train a dragon’.  The students have to summarise the thoughts of the critic.

The following are links to reviews of movies:

Roger Ebert,  Empire,  Metacritic,  Flixster,  Rotten Tomatoes

Now it’s time for critic idol.

Students now have to write their own critique for a movie.  If they have not seen ‘how to train your dragon’ then they can choose the last movie they went to see.

Students watch the following clip to inspire them with ideas on how to conduct a review.

Students are given the following suggestions on how to plan their review.

(1) brief summary

(2)Strengths and weaknesses.(like/don’t like)Why?(give examples)

(3) What characters do you identify with and why?(personality traits)

(4) What was the director intention/message

(5) Marks out of ten :     /10

Students compete in “Critic idol”.

Each student performs their critique in a Kermodian fashion(See the first movie clip of Mark Kermode).  The other students have to decide who is the best critic in the class by giving each critic marks out of ten.

Jing idea- Students record their review of the movie using pictures from the film as a background.

Twitter idea-  Students write a review no longer than 140 characters and they make a twitter board using a big poster to put up in the class or to add to the classes blog.

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