Update: A friend shared with me a letter written by Dr. Hastings, the original creator of Movie Talk, explaining what is and what isn’t a Movie Talk. Turns out, what we call a “Movie Talk” doesn’t really represent his original concept, and therefore, we are asked to use a different term to describe what we do. To respect his wishes, I’ll use the term “Clip Chat”. If you’re interested in what constitutes a Movie Talk and what doesn’t, here’s his description in Dr Hastings’s own words.

Clip Chats are my favorite way to load my Little Darlings up with Comprehensible Input. If you’re new to Clip Chats, here’s a step by step guide. If you’ve been Clip Chatting for a while, you might find a few more tricks to incorporate into your practice. Let’s jump in:

What is a Clip Chat?

A Clip Chat is when the teacher chooses a short video to discuss with the class. The teacher either plays and pauses to ask questions and elicit student responses while watching OR discusses a series of carefully selected screenshots from the video, then shows the video afterwards. I prefer the play and pause method because I like to build suspense…but it tends to annoy students (which I don’t really mind). With classes that are rambunctious or whiney, screenshots achieve the same outcome but with tighter control. For really wild classes, here’s how I Clip Chat- warning it’s not very fun and it’s not supposed to be!

Why Clip Chat?

Clip Chat is just another tool in the Comprehensible Input Toolbox. There are a zillion ways to give our students comprehensible input (the essential ingredient for language acquisition) and Clip Chats just happen to my favorite! I love the variety (you can use music videos, commercials, funny tik toks, silly clips, heartwarming shorts or a segment from a longer movie or even a movie trailer) and the pressure to be hilarious and clever is off. They creator of the video already did the hard part so the teacher only has to facilitate establishing the details and making the story comprehensible. (In my opinion Clip Chatting is WAY easier than creating a story from scratch with students, where you’ve got to be quick on your toes and sometimes the story comes together beautifully with students’ suggestions but sometimes it’s just a lame flop. (Disclaimer: just because a story is a lame flop doesn’t mean that students didn’t get great input.)

Another thing I love about Clip Chats is they make a great anchor for a unit. Find a clip you love and then stretch it out for all it’s worth, with pre and post activities. I’ve got a handful of Clip Chat Units in my TPT store if you teach Spanish 1 BUT there’s no need to buy anything to do a Clip Chat with your Little Darlings, I’ll walk you through how to do it from start to finish.

How to Clip Chat:

Now, there’s a zillion variations and no “right way” to Clip Chat. The best I can do is tell you how I do it (and I’ll show you a few videos) then you need jump in, try it and figure out what works best in your classroom with your Little Darlings.

1. Find a short clip you think students will like. If the clip is about a minute long I Clip Chat it in one class, if it’s 3-5 minutes I will break it into 2 parts and Clip Chat it over two class periods. If it is longer than 5 minutes, it’s probably too long. Here’s a great database of a zillion clips to help you get started, if you don’t already have a clip in mind.

Last week I Clip Chatted this Shakira Commercial. It’s short, cheesy and was a perfect first Clip Chat for my Spanish 1 Little Darlings. I’ll use it as an example to show you how I set up the Clip Chat, what I pre-taught, and I’ll show you what the finished product looked like. (One million thanks to my amiga Suzanne Greenwalt who sent me this commercial! You were right, I just loved it!)

2. Preview the clip and make a list of structures to focus on. Be careful here, you don’t need to talk about everything in the clip, in fact, don’t! You’ll get bogged down by the minutia and you’ll miss giving your students lots of repetitions of high frequency structures. Pick the most essential vocabulary words and phrases that students will need to understand and talk about the clip. Make 2 lists of words:

• High frequency words/phrases that will be important all year long that you want your students to acquire: For the Shakira commercial I picked: le canta (he sings to her), va a comer (is going to eat), baila (she dances), escucha (she listens), le gusta (she or he likes). These are the words I will pre-teach before they see the clip.
• Necessary words to discuss this clip: These words are not necessarily high frequency but important to talk about the story. I don’t pre-teach these. For the Shakira Movie Talk, I picked: un sándwich de jamón (a ham sandwich), una mujer (a woman), un hombre (a man), las papitas (the potato chips) guapa (good looking). These words will be introduced during the Clip Chat by writing them on the board as they come up. The high flyers will pick them up quickly, but they’ll be easily accessible to assist everyone else.

3. Pre-teach the high frequency words/phrases you want students to acquire. I try to do this a few classes before I do the Clip Chat, so they’re really familiar with the structures before we begin. However, sometimes I find a clip that I am so excited to use, I teach the vocab and clip in the same class. Both ways work, but I like spreading them out better.

Especially in my lower level classes, I love teaching new vocab with Total Physical Response (teaching the word with an action that the students motion as the teacher says the word. If you’re having a hard time visualizing it, there’s a video demo in the previous link.) I also do a bit of Personalized Questions and Answers (often referred to as PQA) to use the structures to ask questions about the students and their preferences. In our Shakira example, we discussed, ¿Quién va a comer en la cafetería/en un restaurante/en la casa hoy? (Who is going to eat in the cafeteria/ at a restaurant/at home today?) and as a follow up: ¿Qué vas a comer? (What are you going to eat?). We chatted about ¿Quién canta bien? ¿Quién baila bien? (Who sings well? Who dances well?) discussing students in the class and celebrities. And finally ¿A quién le gusta cantar/bailar? ¿A quién no le gusta cantar/bailar? (Who likes to sing/ dance? Who doesn’t like to sing dance?) You get the idea…use the vocab structures to chat with your students to find out more about them.

4. Expectations: Before you start, you want to be really clear with your students of what you want them to do during the Clip Chat. Here’s what I ask my students to do:

• Be actively engaged
• Signal when Sra. Chase is unclear
• Be ready to show me what you understand

Here’s a short video before starting my Spanish 1’s first Clip Chat ever. The first time I go into more detail about my expectations but every time we do a Clip Chat, I remind them what they need do do, because students who understand what I expect of them are more likely to do it!

5. Clip Chat, finally! Now it’s time to jump in! Either play and pause or put up a series of screenshots to discuss. Here’s what it looks like at The Chase Place:

If you don’t want to watch 20 minutes of slow and comprehensible Spanish, it’s ok! Let me point out some specific things to try during a movie talk and I’ll give you time codes and English translations so you can check them out.

• Ask factual questions about what is happening (0:11-1:01 Who is that? Yes! It’s Shakira! Is Shakira famous or very famous? 15:57-16:05 Is Shakira happy? Is she confused?)
• Establish the details that are not clear by voting (2:20-4:15 Where is she going? Is she going to Walmart? Is she going to Isaac’s house? Let’s vote!)
• Ask questions about the student’s opinions related to the topic (6:18-6:33 Does Shakira sing well or badly? 9:01-9:33 Do you prefer potato chips or Doritos?)
• Coach the students along when they’re not meeting your expectations (0:38-0:40 I only heard 4 people, let’s try that again 20:01-20:17 I feel like you’re losing your steam, let’s try that again.)
• Review what’s been established so far and combine it with new information. (13:37-14:28 Shakira enters and a mysterious man sings to her…but it’s not a mysterious man! It’s a sandwich!)
• Write new words on the board as they become necessary (8:39-9:01 Shakira has potato chips)
• Laugh when your students say something hilarious (9:33-9:44 I asked “Isaac prefers…” and I was expecting them to say potato chips, but that’s not how they responded!)
• Tell them what’s going to happen before it happens…so they’re hanging on your every word! (10:40-12:39 Shakira walks in and there’s a mysterious man!)
• Refocus them when they get squirrely (10:21-10:39 When there’s too much English going on, I will say UNO DOS TRES and you say NO MÁS INGLÉS 13:26-13:33 Call and response to get their attention )
• Do Grammar Pop Ups as needed to draw their attention to meaning and point and pause as you say it (12:10–12:38 LE canta means he sings TO HER)
• Give them a break to stand and process (2:05-2:20 Tell your partner the three things we have established, while the teachers eavesdrops to see what was clear, what was unclear and who hasn’t been paying attention. 12:49-13:24 In English, what has happened so far, as the teacher listens and interacts.)
• Help students make predictions about what they think will happen next (15:13-15:55 Is Shakira going to eat the sandwich? Is she going to dance with the sandwich?
• Connect the story to the students (18:23-18:49 Poor Isaac is sad because Shakira likes the sandwich. )
• Check comprehension often, in different ways:

So…that’s what goes into a Clip Chat. The above is by no means a checklist to follow as you’re doing your own, it’s just what I noticed as I was rewatching the video. If you’re nervous about making it up on the fly, you can absolutely script it ahead of time so you feel prepared to try it in class. The important thing is to go slow, check comprehension and go back if things are unclear.

So what happens after a Clip Chat? Use that story to keep the input flowing! Check out Part 2: After the Movie Talk with lots of ways recycle and assess the story!

(One more disclaimer: for those ultra astute readers who noticed that my two teaching videos are posted on two different YouTube channels, I’ve been meaning to explain this for a while videos of me teaching, that I post for absent students to watch, get uploaded to my school YouTube account. Videos that are just for teachers live on my senorachase.com channel. Feel free to subscribe to either or both!)