Lesson resource: Night of the Living Dead

night-of-the-living-dead-group
I know that Halloween is over a month past. Anyway, I was thinking about authentic, non-copyright texts and I remembered that Night of the Living Dead has never had copyright on it due to a mistake in the original film release. You can download it from The Internet Archive along with subtitles (and if you open the subtitles with a text editor like Notepad or Notepad++, you get yourself a handy script with time codes, although without speaker information).
To save a bit of time, here are some notes I took while I was watching:
10:00 (roughly) Imperatives.
20:00 (roughly) Narratives (Ben tells Barbra what happened, Barbra tells Ben).
36:30 pictorial cues to the next lot of possessions (good for eliciting knowledge of vocab and checking with listening in a minute’s time)
37:25 “I found a gun and some bullets out there. And these. This place… we have a gun and bullets, food and a radio. Sooner or later someone’s bound to get us out.”
40:25 Mr Cooper and Tom enter.
40:45 How long have you been down there?
Conditionals if, when, in case, rhetorical questions, modality will/won’t/can’t/better off. Good for negotiations and making concessions.
48:41 Simple present statements about present state with wasn’t about to mixed in.
50:00 “Does anyone up there know why we’re being attacked?”
“The radio said…” Reporting.
57:40 “The cause… It could be…” /ɪ kʊ biː/
59:40 Locations, possessive for condition.
1:02:40 Possessives. “You can…” for commands.
1:05:00 elision of /d/ in “more and more”
1:05:40 “Where’s that big smile for me?” /weərzat/
1:15:00 “There’s supposed to be a broadcast at 3.”
17:50 “Kill the brain and kill the ghoul.”
1:18:50 Report of killing ghouls. Could be good for a summary.
1:31:20 “We only need a few men to check out the house.”
I hope this is of use to someone. I will probably use it myself at some point, and if noting else, it serves as at least a mental note.

Rod Ellis: Moving task-based language teaching forward

Regular readers know that I am a big advocate of Task-Based Language Teaching. In this video Dr. Rod Ellis discusses some of the problems/issues/misconceptions in TBLT. One of my favourite parts is task complexity, another is teacher education, though the latter is rushed through much more than it ought to be.
If you like this video, or just don’t have an hour to spend on it (which is a shame), you can have a look at my previous post on how to actually do task-based teaching, which is a rough and dirty guide.