Improving listening and language

1. Paris Nous Appartient, by Jacques
Rivette and Le Fabuleux Destin
d'Amélie Poulain, Jean- Pierre
Jeunet.

2. Step 1
Having admired French ‘cinémography’ I
decided to exploit this interest as a means to
improve my listening skills. I looked towards two
classic films I had not seen before in order to
test a) how much I could understand b) what I
could do to overcome any challenges and c)
therefore assess whether films are a useful
educational tool for my language development
in regards to listening skills.

3. Step 2
My first step was to watch the film without subtitles. I found this
challenging due to the quick pace of the dialogue and found that I
lacked some of the necessary vocab.

4. Step 3
I then tried to overcome the ‘pace’ problem by using the subtitles. I found
that this was helpful and improved my understanding of the film. However,
as there was only an English subtitle option I did not feel my listening skills
were improving as much as they could do as from time to time I found
myself reading the English rather than listening out for the French.

5. Step 4
In order to overcome this I found another film, Amélie, and
watched it with French subtitles. I found this extremely helpful
as I was less inclined to simply read the subtitles when they
were in French. When I found certain parts of the film difficult
to understand the French subtitles were useful and combatted
the problem I had previously found concerning the quick pace
of native speakers.

6. Step 5
In order to assess how useful this method was I watched the film
again, without subtitles and found the majority of it easy to
understand. Using French subtitles evidently helped my listening skills
as they aided the expansion of my vocab and helped me recognise
words which did not ‘sound’ familiar but either shared ‘roots’ with my
existing knowledge or were words I could identify in texts but had not
heard in practice. I found this exercise useful and feel confident that
next time I will recognise the vocabulary and, if I do it often enough,
will feel more confident listening to the natural pace of native French
conversations.