AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!! – Using Movie Clips to Help Improve Speaking and Listening Skills for ESL Students

Credit: Disney, Marvel Studios

Who’s your favorite Avenger or other Marvel hero? It can be one of the originals, or the newer heroes from the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe).

For myself, I like Thor and also Star Lord (well, basically all of the Guardians of the Galaxy). Honestly, it’s a quite hard for me to choose just one or two out of the multitude of heroes – since I’m a big fan of the comics as well. But that’s another conversation for another time.

Summer Camp Topic – The Avengers!

This past month, my school held a three-week English summer camp for our elementary students. I was in charge of planning and making materials for two classes I taught – in which we used Marvel movies.

I looked through all of the MCU movies, and chose six different movies using 5-10 minute clips I felt were appropriate for my students (both in content and dialogue). I then made a comprehension worksheet based on the clip from that movie. Since I taught this program for second and third grade students, I had to adjust the question difficulty appropriately.

See these two examples:

Avengers Guardians of the Galaxy 2nd

Avengers Thor Ragnarok 3rd

The students had to watch the clip and then answer the questions. We also discussed what happened in the clip, and predicted what will happen next.

Challenges to Overcome

While it’s quite fun and engaging for students to watch movies and discuss them, it’s also challenging, too. One challenged I faced was the dialogue moving too quickly for students to follow. I couldn’t slow down the movie playback easily, so instead I paused the clip just after the conversation and clarified what the actors said. I also asked if any of the students understood it.

Another challenged I faced was the pacing of the lesson. sometimes clips and worksheets took longer than I expected. Other clips and worksheets weren’t as difficult and the students finished earlier. So, in that case, I played some review games covering the vocabulary and sentences from the clips.

We also made two crafts – Thor’s Hammer and Captain America’s Shield.