Everybody knows that watching movies in their original English language is a very good and fun way to practice your listening skill. You can get used to the natural speed and pronunciation of native speakers talking to native speakers. If you do not understand so much, watching the pictures is still very interesting. You can also easily watch the movie many times over and over, or just a scene. You can watch it once in Japanese so you know what is going on, and then watch the same movie in English as often as you want. Even better, you can look for the original movie script in the internet, and if you are lucky, you can read everything that is said first and then watch it, and understand much much more. As I found out last week, the chances to find the movie script for the movie you like to watch are actually really really good.
Last week, I was looking for the lyrics of “Let it go“, the theme song of the popular Disney movie “Frozen”. One of my students bought the DVD to practice her listening skill. She loves the song, as many of our girl students, and wanted to know the lyrics. While looking for the lyrics I was very much amazed to find the whole script of the movie on an official Disney site, also. It is a pdf, ready to download. Great service! With the script, she can actually read what is said ahead. It will make it much easier for her to understand, and she will also learn much faster to understand English because of this “discovery”! And anybody who likes the movie “Frozen” and wants to study his or her English listening skill with it can just follow her lead.
For me as an English teacher, this was just a start. Happy that I found the script of the movie “Frozen” thanks to the great service of Disney, I kept searching for all kinds of movies. “Frozen” is very popular in Japan, but my students like all kinds of movies. Next, I looked for the movie script of the classic love story “When Harry meet Sally” with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. Bingo! How about an action movie, like the now classic first movie of the X-men series? Here is the script. Found in less than five seconds. Just put the movie name and the word “script” into any major search engine and there it is. So, How about ER or the popular sitcom iCarly?
Not all scripts are as nice as the Frozen script from Disney. Some can be downloaded as pdf, but many cannot. Some include a description of the scenes, some do not even include the name of the speaker. However it is a great service for any learner of English. Do not only watch and listen to your favorite movies in English, read them as well! There is no better way to practice your listening skill. I for my part got busy telling all my students about this great opportunity.
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