The Effectiveness of Using Movie Material to Develop Form-Meaning Pair Skills

This paper aims to investigate whether movie material is effective in developing skills related to form-meaning pairs. To accomplish this, four participants were recruited for the study, three of whom were at an intermediate level and one at a low-intermediate level based on their TOEIC scores. Among them, two intermediate level participants and the low-intermediate participant had extensive experience using movies as learning material. The participants were given two tests: a form→meaning pair test and a meaning→form pair test using an animated movie. Following these tests, they underwent an additional set of tests using a children’s novel. The results from the animation tests revealed that all the participants were proficient in deriving pragmatic meaning when the examiner disregarded the correctness or incorrectness of the translation. However, three of them struggled with the meaning→form pair test. On the other hand, the results from the novel tests indicated that all the participants performed significantly better in the meaning→form pair test compared to the same test using the animation. These findings suggest that movie users quickly adapt to capturing pragmatic meaning, but they may require training in developing meaning→form pair skills. Merely using movies does not guarantee effective bi-directional understanding of form-meaning and meaning-form pairs. Further details will be discussed.