Introducing critical literacy and multimodal perspectives into film pedagogies for the EAL classroom

Although films are frequently used in English language classrooms, the exact purposes they are meant to serve are not always clear. This chapter reports findings from a study investigating lower secondary English teachers’ discourses concerning their classroom film practices, which show that teachers often regard films as a source of information about historical and social conditions or as a means for compensating an insufficiency in pupils’ language skills, maturity or motivation. The chapter discusses the potential for using films to build critical literacy skills in the English language classroom, exemplifying this through a critical and multimodal reading of Taylor’s film The Help.