WHAT IS THE EFR PROJECT?

Films put language and culture in the context of a story. Feature films grab the attention of today's students. However, one difficulty is matching films with the ability level of the students, so that a film is at least partially comprehensible yet not fully comprehensible without effort. At either extreme (very little understanding vs. complete understanding), the student benefits little from watching. In the classroom, an instructor often wants to show multiple short clips from a film. The EFR approach addresses both scenarios: a student watching a film in self-study mode and an instructor showing selected clips during class.

The Electronic Film Review (EFR) approach is based on open standards and can be implemented in any media player for time-coded video that supports playing a segment of video based on time codes. This does not include streamng video that does not support jumping reard and backward. The current implementation of the EFR approach runs on Windows XP computers that have decoders suitable for watching DVDs in Windows Media Player. The current EFR software does not include its own DVD decoders.

For individual language study, each user-defined clip of a film can be annotated with vocabulary, culture, and other notes. A film thus treated becomes comprehensible to a wider range of students because the student can request just as much help as is needed to understand a clip and can easily watch the same clip several times if desired.

This interactive, one-computer-one student approach makes feature films into language learning tools. The EFR approach is intended to be used in conjunction with advance organizers that prepare the student to better understand the film and with post-viewing activities that allow the student to apply the vocabulary acquired through study of the film and and its annotations.

EFR user documentation

SITE MANAGEMENT:

The EFR Team; Brigham Young University