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 Wednesday July 04 2007

Prison Break &Subtitles

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on a lesson utilizing Prison Break’s pilot episode. This lesson is for my English Communication summer course which is mostly 4th year students with a high English proficiency. The course is in a computer lab and the lesson utilizes this, but could easily be adapted for teaching in a regular classroom with a little work.

I’ve been thinking about a lesson that provided instructions for students on how best to use subtitles for language acquisition for some time. I finally have the opportunity to be able to teach it and hope the lesson works. I chose Prison Break as most of my students are familiar with the show, it’s current and very popular, and I also enjoy the show.

To prepare this lesson I ripped the pilot episode from DVD in four sections.  The first clip is 5:13 seconds long and has Korean subtitles, the second clip is 5:55 seconds long with no subtitles. The third clip is 7:17 seconds and has English subtitles. The final clip was ripped 3 times, one with English subs, one with no subs, and one with Korean subs - each being three minutes long. If you have access to the DVD you can easily rip with subtitles using Xilosoft’s DVD Ripper.

My lesson plan takes 3 hours to complete and students will only watch the first 21:20 seconds of the pilot - it’s available here: prison break lesson_plan (MS word) The student handout is available in here:
prison break. handout (PDF)if you would like the original MSpublisher file send me an email and I’ll pass it on.

Two articles of interest related to subtitles and ESL/EFL can be found here and here.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jul 4, 2007 at 12:10 PM
Teaching | Lesson_Plans | teaching_application |
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Katie wrote 61 words  on  Saturday Jul 7, 2007  at  10:57 PM Bosnia and Herzegovina

Hey, this is nicely done - I’m going to post about it.  I like how you create these nice-looking handouts and also personalize the questions.  These are secondary to the content of the lesson of course (that’s also good!) but still they make a difference.  I’ve still never seen Prison Break but I may just have to give it a try.

Sean.

Sean. wrote 67 words  on  Sunday Jul 8, 2007  at  06:13 AM Korea (South)

Thanks for the praise. Glad that you like the hand out. Prison Break is pretty good, but the finale for season two was pretty lame and I’m debating whether or not to continue watching from next season.

For the record, this lesson went very well. Though there were some groans at the end of the third hour when they realized that they couldn’t see the entire episode.

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