5 Silent Era Film Clips on YouTube to Use in the Language Classroom

Wouldn't it be great to go back to simpler times? Like when I was younger and I would return home from grade school to find a letter my grandmother had written me, waiting for me in the mailbox?

My students have smartphones that whistle, chirp, vibrate and demand their attention and provide constant gratification. They are addicted to them.

I have a strict "No Smartphone Policy" in my classroom. Consequently, when I turn on the projector to show a YouTube clip, I see my half-dazed students immediately sit up straight, eyes widen in anticipation, ready to devour visual information. I wish my enthusiasm could be enough but it's not anymore. In their eyes, I can't compete with YouTube. 

I wish my enthusiasm could be enough but it's not anymore. In their eyes, teachers can't compete with YouTube. 

I don't lie. I am addicted to my smartphone too. I use apps like CandyCrush, Instagram, and WeChat and I find myself playing on them rather than talking with my boyfriend on the couch next to me, reading Anna Karenina, or writing this blog post. I know they satisfy a deeper human need: To zone out. To be thought of by someone else. To be in the know. To broadcast our identities. 

One time a student cried in my classroom because in the middle of a grammar lecture she pulled out her smart phone and began texting. In response, I calmly stopped my lecture and from my backpack pulled out my smartphone. I heard someone in the peanut gallery mockingly chide me, "Michael. No smartphones. Put your smartphone away." I retorted, "But Vanessa is checking her smartphone."

Vanessa ran out of the classroom crying.

A part of me wants to ban all technology in the classroom. The classroom is where we leave the world behind and invest in the-here-and-the-now to reimagine, reinvent, transform ourselves. Smartphones and Smartclassrooms remind us of the outside and pull us back to the hustle and bustle of post-modern living. Ugh.

Instead of banning all technology in the class, I'm bringing more and more technology into the classroom. Why? Because I'm going to show student how to use it strategically. I'm going to model how to use technology to learn. Asking them for search words and refining with them the search words when Googling. Pressing mute during advertising when we YouTube. Setting timers when using our smartphones for research in groupwork. And I'm going to teach them digital literacy skills by boring them to death with black and white silent movies on YouTube.

Seriously, silent movies are great for language classrooms because spoken language doesn't interfere with the intake of content.

Below is a list of silent era film clips that I use in my classroom to teach an array of language skills.

1) Interpretation Depends on Context

Press play. The video is only 17 seconds long. Is the man hungry? Sad? Or lustful?

We infer wether we know it or not. And when we infer, we all might see something different. Film editors realized this over 100 years ago.

Strategically guessing the meaning of unknown vocabulary words rather than using smartphones to translate is a skill that takes know-how, dedication, and discipline. From the students' point of view, a quick translation solves the immediate problem and requires less thinking than surveying the known data points and inferring the unknowns. In other words, they want the technology to tell them what to think.

 If I ask my students to guess the meaning of the words "talkie," "usher out," and "era" the below sentence,

The Jazz Singer was the first commercially successful talkie, quietly ushering out the era of silent films.

my students will groan. Inferring is cognitively demanding... but not impossible!

The Kuleshov Experiment has been a great way to show my students that I understand their frustrations of guessing from context. The same clip of man is shown three times but because of the surrounding information he can look hungry, sad, or lustful. We use context to interpret whether we have realized it or not.

Everything is up for interpretation. I tell my students that everything they know, they inferred at one point and they have been slowly collecting enough data points to perceive it as truth. So we might as well become aware of it and practice it or otherwise our brains will remain soft.

2) Present Progressive Verb Tense

On June 15, 1978 Eadweard Muybridge helped Leland Stanford settle a bet that horses do indeed "fly" or lift all four hooves off the ground and do not have a front and back extended posture of a rocking-horse when running.

Silent films tend to isolate actions because the first movie-goers were not visually had not yet been trained to track multiple actions on the silver screen. 

Growing up learning a language like Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, my students have a difficult time comprehending English speakers' fastidious need for aspect, an action in relationship to the flow of time. Silent films can provide visual fodder to help you teach aspect because one action plays out at a time.

English is curious because even though Muybridge filmed this man riding this horse in 1878, when I look at this this YouTube clip, rather than using the past progressive, I would use the present progressive to describe the aspect.

What is the man doing? He is riding a horse.

Past Progressive is not wrong but if I asked you to describe the man's action before playing the clip stating it in the past progressive, you'd most likely scratch your head.

What was the man doing?

My job is presenting students with as many activities as possible for them to train their neuropathways to connect the appropriate aspect and the appropriate verb form. All of this in real time. Muybridge's plates provide great practice.

3) Comparing and Contrasting Language

Having introduced context and present progressive, we get to one of the most seemingly innocent but also still kind of raunchy clips for today's audiences.

Press play. 18 seconds filmed in 1896.

Edison's Kinetoscope catalogue describes the "The Kiss" as, "They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time."

I love showing this clip because it can still get a reaction out of students. What are they doing? What is the context? Why is the kiss so tender, so intimate, yet so awkward?

In 1896 this film from a stage production of a play would have been shown three times in a row in nickelodeons or peep shows. The general public was scandalized. A contemporary critic wrote: "The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting."

At this point in my lesson plan, I show with the music muted Nicki Minaji's 2014 music video Anaconda. I ask students to use the following sentence starter to write three sentences comparing and contrasting the visual information.

• In first YouTube video ________. In the second YouTube video _______.

Student responses have included:

• In first YouTube video two people are kissing. In the second YouTube video the woman is touching another girl's butt.
• In the first YouTube video the woman is wearing clothes. In the second YouTube video the women are dancing with little clothing.
• In 1896 "The Kiss" shocked people. In 2015 "Anaconda" doesn't shock people.

By the way, I believe Nicki Minaj is the future of pop-culture! 

4) Future Verb Tense and Predicting Skills

This is the first Western. 10 minutes of Good vs Bad, The Law vs Outlaws, the Innocent vs the Greedy. Back in the day these tropes were new stuff and nowadays everybody knows this narrative by heart. So teaching predicting skills, aka "What do you think will happen next?", is a safe bet for everybody in your class.

As a language teacher, students perceive grammar skills as their key to language development. And while grammar skills are an integral part of language learning, there is more than just decoding aspect. When one reads a sentence, listens to a someone speak, one is constantly flipping through their rolodex of contexts to interpret and infer what is being communicated. Does this one fit? No. That's can't be it but that's funny. Does this one fit? No. That doesn't make sense at all. Does this one work? Yes! Ohhhh... That is what he means...

My job is teaching students to recognize that understanding English and using English is not exclusively a grammar translation issue; it's a familiarity and ability to process a million data points, making thousands of inferences-- culture and context being the bulk of these data points. Therefore, we need to bring "predicting skills" into our routine classroom processes.

When showing 1903's The Great Train Robbery to your students, you can stop it anywhere and ask, "What is happening now?" "What do you think will happen next." My favorite moment to pause it is at 7:43 when the train robbers have stopped the train and all the passengers have deboarded and they are all lined up along the side of train at gun point. Pause it. Ask your students, "What do you think will happen next?"

 "Somebody will run."

"Which one do you think will run?"

"The man who is tapping his foot on the rail."

"What do you think will happen to him if he runs?"

"The bad guys will shoot him."

"Let's see if your prediction is correct."

"What happened?"

If you don't already, I recommend teaching your students predicting skills so you can ask students, "What do you think will happen if you don't study for your test."

5) A Discussion on Culture and Othering

My students don't know how much Chinese and/or Japanese I know. I lived in these countries a decade ago and I have forgotten a lot. In other words, I am rusty and I know students will test me if I let onto them that I speak their languages.

So they don't know that I can eavesdrop of their conversations. Mostly they are speaking about inconsequential things like, "Can I borrow your eraser?" "What did you bring to school for lunch?" "Do you have WeChat?" But once in a while I get some juicy tidbits of information. One of these being... they call Americans "foreigners."

This one makes me smile because in their minds we are the strangers.

Seemingly innocent, once again, is Georges Méliès' 1902 A Trip to the Moon. You know... the one that shows the moon with the rocket in the eye. 

Once again you can stop the film anywhere you want to practice the present progressive, ask for student predictions of what will happen, and ask students to check those predictions using the simple past and past progressive. There are gobs of vocabulary you can give students. 

But what I look for when I show my students this silent film is a class discussion afterwards on The Unknown. My questions for the students include:

• Why did the humans go to the moon?
• How did the explorers react to the foreigners? Why?
• What is the difference between 1903 and 2015?
• Why did you come to the US?
• How do you feel when you encounter the Unknown?
• Why do we have technology?

Which brings me back to a deeper conversation I repeatedly have with my students about technology. Technology can take us places: physically, mentally, and emotionally. Silent Films can take us back a century ago when mechanical technologies were new.

A sucker is born every quarter of a second and the internet, computers, and smartphones can demand our attention and provide us with all the feels we need.

But where is technology taking us if it goes unchecked? If we, the consumers, don't become aware of how technology is using us, what will the consequences be?

Inevitably, someone will mockingly chastise me, "But, Michael, aren't we using technology right now... to learn?

And Bingo was his Name-O.