THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FILM REVIEW IN ENHANCING STUDENTS’ ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS

Abstract

This study highlighted the effectiveness of film review in enhancing English speaking skills among students at the tertiary level. The population involved was 30 students from an Essential Communication Skills class at Universiti Malaysia Sabah. There were two parts of film review carried out for this study, namely, Part 1: Individual Film Review Presentation and Part 2: Group Discussion and 2 weeks prior, the teacher-researcher provided materials such as examples of vocabularies, grammars, phrases and sentences students could use to describe film genres, characters, themes, recommendations and criticisms in their film review. For Part 1 of the film review, in groups of 5, individual students orally presented the review of their chosen film whilst showing their power point slides whereas for Part 2, they gave ideas and opinions on the best film of those presented by their group members. The objective of this study was to identify students’ perceptions on the effectiveness of film review in enhancing their English-speaking skills. To accomplish that objective, this study employed a survey research design and the instrument utilised in the data collection was an online questionnaire comprising 10 questions on students’ perceptions on English film watching and review which was administered to 30 respondents. The data was then analysed using a google form spreadsheet and presented in pie charts and bar graphs. The findings depicted that students perceived that film review enhanced their English-speaking skills in the aspects of motivation and confidence in speaking simple English and applying appropriate English grammars, vocabularies, pronunciation, intonation, and conversational phrases in expressing ideas and opinions. They also opined that English subtitles in films and guidance from educators in reviewing films contributed positively to the development of their English-speaking acquisition as well as deduced that film review was an effective English learning tool. These positive findings hence signalled that the teaching and learning of English through films should be sustained in the future. It is recommended that future studies include larger numbers of respondents and interviews of students and teachers to obtain more holistic findings on the film review effectiveness towards students’ English-speaking competency. Other interesting topics to be studied are the challenges encountered by both learners and educators in the teaching and learning of English through films and ways to overcome them.