The Effective Audio-Visual Program in Foreign Language and Literature Studies.

Foreign language teachers should exploit the American affinity for television and movies by using foreign language feature films and shorts in the classroom. Social and political history and literary trends illustrated in the films may be discussed and absorbed along with the language. The author teaches such a course in the Department of Italian at UCLA, for which shorts and features were obtained from the Italian Consulate and the Instituto Italiano di Cultura, often free of charge. The discipline of semiotics analyzes the communicative value of signs and classifies them as arbitrary (as in written language), iconic (in visual language), or indexic (qualified iconic signs). The instructor may use the iconic and indexic signs in a film to teach the arbitrary signs, or vocabulary, of the foreign language. The second section of this paper deals with the teaching of film as literature. Methods of stylistic analysis used for written literature may be applied to film to increase understanding and research into this art form. (CK)