Beyond challenges: a task-based approach to teaching spoken English through movie language

This paper explores the use of movie language to raise students’ awareness of spoken grammar using a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach combined with corpus linguistics techniques. Forty English as a foreign language (EFL) learners completed four tasks over a period of three weeks. The tasks focused on the writing, analysis, and performance of a movie scene from the American Movie Corpus (AMC). The study adopted a mixed-method approach, using both qualitative and quantitative data. A statistical analysis of learners' scripts and speaking performances showed the experimental TBLT design to have had a significant effect on learners' knowledge of spoken features (i.e. discourse markers). A qualitative content analysis of students’ interviews (N=6) served as an additional data set for triangulation of these results.