Lights, Camera, Action! Movie Cinema nights at the school.

25th January 2017 

Don’t you just love the whiff of freshly roasted popcorn, the plush feel of fluffy cushions, and the cosy indoor ambience that automatically comes with staying in to watch a film?! That’s exactly what we’re lucky enough to experience here at Gateway’s weekly Movie Nights!

Even though we’re just halfway through January, we’ve already had a ball these last couple of weeks, when we watched family favourites and comedy classics like The Princess Bride and Mrs Doubtfire, and are now looking forward to a more sombre tone of genre and a more recent release with Snowden, which we’ll be watching this evening.

We aim to keep things balanced by rotating between different genres from week to week, making sure to satisfy everyone’s personal preferences through a wide choice of films. With this in mind, we will be screening films ranging from comedy to drama, from romance to action thriller, from biography to fantasy and sci-fi, and from blockbuster hits and new releases to more independent or artistically respected productions. We are also making it a point to stay open to student feedback as we go along and will even be showing films based on students’ suggestions from time to time, which we will screen while the students who suggest them are still here.

What’s great about these movie nights (apart from the fact that they’re only €3 and include popcorn!), is that they do not simply involve screening a film, but are:

• fully subtitled so that students do not need to rely only on their listening and can follow the film better thanks to the on-screen text,
• held in the presence of a teacher who can take questions or explain anything that is unclear in the plot or the language used in the film,
• followed by a guided discussion which is prepared and led by the teacher, and which allows students to comment on the things that they liked or didn’t like and discuss the main themes of the film.

In summary, these movie nights are proving to be very good listening practice during the film and an excellent opportunity for spoken interaction in a relaxed, social environment afterwards. There is no better way to learn a language than to immerse yourself in it fully, by exposing yourself to all and any of its cultural and artistic products, like film and music, and by expressing your resulting reactions and views with others who are willing to listen and share opinions and ideas of their own. We therefore look forward to welcoming more and more students to our cosy in-class cinema to help them make the most of this entertaining yet effective language learning event.

Now let’s dim those lights, sit back, relax and lose ourselves in some cinematic storytelling. PLAY.

#WatchingEnglish #ListeningToEnglish #SpeakingInEnglish