Film and Language Acquisition

“Film is the greatest educational medium the world has ever known.”

—Preston Sturges

In the twenty first century, film ought to occupy a central spot in any language department. This should be the case whether one examines graduate studies, programs for undergraduate majors and minors, or basic language programs. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Written text still reigns supreme. It is not my place to argue why this is so, just as it is not my place to argue what an undergraduate or graduate program should look like when its emphasis is literature and culture. I will instead approach the issue of the role of film from the viewpoint of language and language acquisition. And I will begin with the central concept of input.

After four plus decades of research on second language acquisition, it is now fact that the acquisition of language (that is, the acquisition of an abstract and complex mental representation of language) happens as a result of three minimal components: input, internal mental architecture, and the mechanisms that mediate between input and the internal architecture. (For some discussion, see Gass, Behney, and Plonsky 2013; as well as VanPatten and Williams 2015.) That is, language is not acquired because of practice but because of exposure to language in communicative events. Many readers may recognize this statement as another way of saying that exposure to input is necessary for language acquisition. Input is simply language that one hears (or sees) that is part of communication, the latter being defined as the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning in a given context. In other words, input is language that we attend to for its propositional content and intent. There is not a single aspect of language that is not acquired through the interaction of the internal learning architecture with communicative input. (I am purposefully not specifying what the internal architecture is in this essay. It is not necessary to do so in order to make my main point.) Thus, everything from lexicon (words and their properties) to language specific syntactic operations (movement) to morphology (the inflectional properties of words) to phonology (sounds, sound sequences, syllabic structure, intonation), and more gets into our heads because of the interaction of input with internal architecture.

So what does this have to do with film? As one might guess, for students who do not have consistent contact with speakers of another language, film can be a significant source of input. Because learners will watch film and listen to interactions between characters, film is communicative input. But why advocate for the inclusion of film as part of language development? Let us consider for a moment the odds that are stacked against a typical second language learner when it comes to input. To do so, let’s start with child first language (L1) acquisition. We now know that acquisition may actually begin in the womb. We also know that some very important aspects of acquisition happen during the first year after birth (e.g., various aspects of phonological acquisition). We also know that for all intents and purposes, acquisition of the formal aspects of language is pretty much in place by the age of five (with peripheral and marked parts of language coming in with literacy development and exposure to complex discourse; see, for example, Pinker 2007). So, let’s focus on these years of acquisition: one to five years of age, or four years. Assuming an average of eight hours a day multiplied by seven days a week multiplied by 52 weeks a year multiplied by four years, we come up with 8 × 7 × 52 × 4 = 11,648 hours. A child L1 learner then gets close to 12,000 hours of input and interaction with that input during early childhood. And just to be sure, let me repeat that we are ignoring here the impact of literacy on continued communicative and discursive development including pragmatics, vocabulary, rhetoric/discourse and other non-formal aspects of language.

Now let’s consider a typical adult taking Spanish as a college student who begins with Spanish 101 (first semester). That student is in class for four hours...