Hannah Hasbun Article Summary #2 Incidental Foreign Language Acquisition from Media Exposure Perhaps, then, an important mission

for teachers of English as a foreign language lies in providing pupils with skills, strategies and viewing behaviors that optimize their incidental language acquisition from media exposure outside the classroomEngaging students to produce subtitles for short English fragments may further arouse their interest in and awareness of subtitling practices (conclusion). While this article was in reference to different languages and therefore different learners, I think that its just as applicable for English leaners of Japanese. I remember when I was in high school in my Japanese class, every Friday we used to watch a movie in Japanese with English subtitles. In the article, it mentions that a counter argument to the effectiveness of movies with subtitles is that students will rely on the subtitles and not listen to the language being spoken. I identify with that because as a student, I remember doing that myselffocusing on the subtitles and largely tuning out the Japanese being spoken. However, I think that if the movie is presented differently than just as a movie, the students will view it differently as well. For example, as said in the quote, if the students did an activity before the movie where they wrote their own subtitles for short Japanese fragments, they might empathize more with the process of subtitling and listen to hear connections they can make between the Japanese and the English. It might also help to watch the fragments of the movie in an analytical sense without subtitles, encouraging the students to listen for vocabulary they recognize and try to deduce what the whole utterance was, and then re-watch it with subtitles to see how they did (this could even be good for a familiar movie, if not better, because theyd have more context to draw their conclusions from). I feel like if the teacher regards media in this way, it will feed down to the students and they can learn to view it as another source for language learning. Especially in Japanese classrooms, many students start taking the language because of its media culture in the first place. Because of that, I think that using this media as an instructional tool would be invaluable and powerfully effective. It would be a challenge to get students to change their perception of something they already have a deep interest in or a very set paradigm of, but finding a way to do thatmaybe through various types of activities like the subtitling one abovewould give way to a whole new and limitless form of language learning for the students, not to mention learning the language as its genuinely used rather than in a classroom context.

How can I facilitate the shift in students perception of media from something only for leisure to something they can learn from? I wonder what the best way to encourage students to take this perception of media away from the classroom and utilize it in their own free time would be. How can I keep students from just disposing their new perception of media and instead help them recycle it and apply it to different kinds, like video games or comic books?

Citation: Kuppens, A. H. (2010). Incidental foreign language acquisition from media exposure. Learning, Media and Technology, 35(1), 65-85. doi: 10.1080/17439880903561876