Learning Kids Games: scripts

Showing posts with label scripts. Show all posts

Saturday, June 20, 2009

A Database of Film Scripts

Something that's always handy to have as either reading materials, support for video lessons or for drama projects, is access to up to date film scripts, so The Internet Movie Script Database is a great one to keep in your bookmarks.

It has quite a few up-to-date movies that are reasonably easy to access. You can search for a particular name or browse by genre or by alphabetical listing.

There's a landing page with a few ads on before you get to the actual script link, but one you get to the script it's reasonably easy to print or copy for you students.

As I said, there are lots of ways you can use these scripts:

Get students to learn and act them out
get students to read parts of the script and try to imaging the way the actor would say the lines (what kinds of emotions they would express through the words etc) then watch the films and compare.
Get students to watch the film and follow + analyse language
Get students to listen and mark on any features of pronunciation
Get students to listen the film and try to imitate pronunciation and record themselves
Use small parts as reading activities
You could cut and paste the script into something like CuePrompter and get them to read lines from it that way.

Scripts like this add a new dimension to reading activities because they use spoken language and screen / stage direction that push students to imagine and visualise how things would happen and be communicated visually on film.

I hope you and your students enjoy them. Here you can find activities for exploiting movies

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Create Text to Speech Movies

I've just been playing with a really nice tool called Xtranormal that enables you to create nice animated movies. You can create a scene an a series of movies simply by choosing back drops and characters, writing your script for them and then just drop on different actions and sound effects.

This is an example that took me about 10 - 15 mins to create (Took me a while to work out that you had to write the script first - Der!!)

In many ways this is a similar tool to one of my long term favourites DFilm, which I wrote about some time ago in Make you own animated movies, though this is perhaps even better as the characters take your script and actually say it using the wonders of text to speech.

Xtranormal is a great tool for generating listening and writing activities, as well as being a lot of fun. I hope to be publishing some teaching tips for it soon.

At present the site is still n beta and it says that it is free to use for now, which makes me think you should use it now as they might start charging soon.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Drama Scripts for EFL ESL Students

Finding simple free drama scripts that we can use with EFL / ESL students can be something of a challenge, but I've just found a virtual (forgive the pun) gold mine of them on the Education World website.

They not only provide free downloadable versions of the scripts, but there is also a basic lesson plan with each one and some suggestions for vocabulary words students will need and follow up questions to ask the students.

The scripts are probably best suited for young learners or teens, but you might find something for adults too, as I haven't had time to look through them all.

Education World has been around for years and it's easy sometimes to overlook sites like this because we are so focused on what's new, but the site really is worth checking out and has a real wealth of free materials.

Check out the scripts here

Hope you enjoy it.

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Nik Peachey Read More..