Effective Use of Audio-Visual Materials in Teaching English Writing

Ryoko Sanada

Japanese-English translation has been one of the popular methods of English writing education in Japan. However, textbooks in this field rarely have enough information about the context of situations involved in passages which students are supposed to translate.

To improve this situation, I suggest the use of audio-visual materials. I will discuss my experiment using Japanese TV dramas as materials for my English writing class. Some criteria should be considered for choosing dramas or scenes. How to make a teaching plan of one class hour is also presented. Finally, opinions of students about this method are introduced and I conclude that this method produces results which traditional textbooks don’t in many cases.