One of the strategies used by the participants in this study was to watch the movie based on Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations when they had problems reading the respective texts. The students were not told by the lecturer to watch a movie or to refer to online resources. The students of their own accord looked for movies on Youtube and watched the movies as they read the novels.
The extracts below are from students’ responses to reading the canonical texts, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations. The students indicate how they use movies to help with their reading and understanding of the respective novels.
I searched for the movie on Youtube and found it, if at least I watched it could help me understand. Chad/Great Expectations
Chad depended on his prior knowledge of the availability of movies on Youtube to search for the film based on the canonical text. He was confident that watching the movie would help him understand the canonical text. Thus, the movie was an entry point and also a scaffolding for him to understand the text.
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…watched a short clip of the movie on youtube. I kept pace of the movie with the reading of the novel. Melissa/Wuthering Heights
Melissa who watched the movie on Youtube had her own design of reading and watching the movie. She “kept pace” her reading of the text with watching the movie. She read five to six chapters and watched the movie to the point of the chapters that she had read. She then, wrote her journal entries after having a better understanding of what she had read by watching the movie.
I used the help of a movie to give me a general picture of what the novel (Great Expectations) was about. In addition to that, I got a deeper understanding and clearer picture of what it might have been like then. I can proudly say that the movie brought life to the pages of Great Expectations. David / Great Expectations
David’s understanding of the novel was at different levels. He used the movie to get a general idea of the novel. He also managed to get a deeper understanding of the novel by watching the movie. As a person who has not travelled abroad, he depended on the movie to bring “life” to the pages of the novels. The scenery depicted in the movie helped him to transfer the words on the page to pictures he could understand. David has a sense of accomplishment that he managed to understand the novel by using the movie as a bridge.
The participants in their interviews reiterated that watching movies helped them to understand the novel better. It also helped the participants to picture scenery of descriptions of places and settings that they have not encountered. Shahid writes that the movie helped him to picture what a moor looks like.
It helped me to picture how a moor looks like…
Shahid / Wuthering Heights
The dark castle and description of the things not touched (dust, rats) since she was abandoned at the altar was easier to picture after watching the movie. Ashu / Great Expectations
Ashu finds that creating pictures of the dark and dilapidated castle “was easier” after watching the movie. The students repeatedly write in their journals that the movies helped them to picture the scenery better. The movies helped them to understand the canonical novel better. Thus, watching the movie was not an exercise that did not contribute to understanding reading but one that led to a better understanding of the novel.
Many teachers are wary that students who watch movies will not read the texts that have been assigned to them. When books are adapted for the screen “the media and book people usually work together so that… either the opening or closing credits encourage viewers to read the book” (Donelson and Nilsen, 1989, p. 30). Literary texts that have been made into movies include the works of Shakespeare to contemporary novels like the Harry Potter series and Twilight series. Students are very comfortable with the visual media and the language propagated in the media. Students interact and learn easily from the visual media (Smilanich and Lafreniere, 2010, p. 605). Students feel comfortable with the language of the visual. The present generation grew up with the visuals of various media. This is a language that they seemingly learn easily and, via these visuals, the language of print literature becomes accessible. For the more proficient students, the study of film affords an opportunity to learn something new. The proficient students learn the words and techniques, which form the visuals that they watch in movies every day. As for the less proficient students, the challenging book is demystified. The film captures the book in a language that the student is able to understand.
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The implication is that teachers by introducing a literary text t