This paper represents the third part of an attempt to review the history of teaching English through films in Japan. The main objective of this historical study is to reveal how commercial films have been utilized in the teaching of English in Japan. It also aims to reveal the present state and possible challenges faced by teachers using films in the classroom. This paper focuses on the first half of the 1990s, when the use of films began to be examined from various standpoints, including motivation, listening and syllabus design. The motivational effect of films was reported in a number of studies while the results on learners' listening comprehension were still varied. Also, the establishment of the Association of Teaching English through Movies (ATEM) in 1995 helped lead researchers to further examine the use of films in the classroom. This paper concludes that following the 1980s, in which the focus of studies was on classroom use, the early 1990s marked the start of actual research on teaching through films in Japan.

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In the interpersonal communication of our native language, we naturally select the speech style most appropriate for the current situation, though mostly we do that subconsciously. When learning English through movies, we can find hedging and boosting devices are creating the pragmatic effect of our utterances, and they contribute to constituting the speech style most suitable for natural communication. Thus considering this, we have chosen tags as our research topic, since they are typical instances of both hedging and boosting devices, and analyzed their behaviors through movies. As a result, we found, when they are effectively used as positive politeness strategies (together with their hedging and boosting characteristics), they constitute the convergence speech style which promotes friendly relationship between the interlocutors. We also noticed they can be used to create the divergence speech style by which we can maintain face/our own self-esteem. Accordingly, if we can learn the effective use of tags, keeping the balance between convergence and divergence speech styles, we can be successful in any interpersonal communication.

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While the use of film in language teaching is well established, with the exception of Rose (2001) there has been virtually no research to assess the validity of film use as an authentic representation of actual language use. Rose found that film data correspond closely with ethnographic data cited in pragmatics research in terms of syntactic formula, compliment topic and compliment response strategy but gender distribution and compliment response strategy diverged significantly. This study replicated Rose's research by creating a corpus of films based on a survey of 302 visitors to the ITESLJ website about the films that they use for language teaching! learning purposes and then identifying compliments in the film corpus. The results of this investigation yielded similar results to that of Rose (2001), pointing to the robustness of film as a consistent model of pragmalinguistic behavior. Furthermore, like the Rose study, the results of this investigation indicate that sociolinguistic aspects such as gender distribution and compliment response strategy diverged significantly from the ethnographic data cited extensively in pragmatics research.

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This paper explores the effects of the task called "Shadowing" in the movie based EFL classroom. "Shadowing" has been originally used to train simultaneous translators. It is defined as an auditory tracking task which involves the immediate vocalization of the speech that is heard. Recently, it has been considered to be effective even for general EFL learners to enhance both listening and speaking performance. This paper will introduce how "shadowing" has been specifically adapted for movie-based English classes. Finally, the result of a study finding that "Shadowing" facilitates both learners' listening comprehension and oral performance will be discussed.

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Teaching English using movies has been tried in various ways. This paper reports an attempt to integrate reading a children's novel and watching the film version. The main focus of the course was placed on reading dialogues or scripts aloud and acting out roleplays. The survey conducted at the end of the term revealed that most of the students responded favorably to the integrated content of the course and that about half of the students enjoyed participating in dialogue practice and role plays. However, it can also be interpreted that some students did not feel comfortable with the teaching method using drama techniques such as acting out a play in front of class. The paper concludes by discussing the implications and possible ways to improve the course.

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