The final aim of this study is to confirm the effectiveness of key-word English captions in EFL learners' listening comprehension. To reach the goal, a preliminary experiment was conducted to examine the potential of key-word English captions in understanding the story of a movie. Keyword English captions were adopted to reduce learners' load in reading full captions and to have learners pay much more attention to spoken English. The conclusion is that key-word English captions have almost the same effect as full captions in terms of understanding the story of the movie. The researcher is planning to conduct other experiments to examine when to present key-word English captions and how learners' process in listening is affected by key-word English captions.

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This paper is intended to put emphasis on the usage of movie English which will develop an individual acquisition in English education. In analyzing factors to create an individual level in English, motivational factors as well as cognitive acquisitions must be discussed in relation to the learning attitude toward language acquiring. The story of "The Miracle Worker" is based partially on a biography of Helen Keller, who suffered from three different physical difficulties. Helen's desire for acquiring the language was enlightened by Ann M.Sullivan, who contributed her whole life to educating Helen using all her efforts. Many words or sentences offered by Sullivan were shown in sixteen scenes, in which any English teacher will find out the learning process of how she trained Helen in each scene of this film. One of the best scenes in this film is shown when Helen comes across the meaning of water and pronounces "W...A...T...E...R..." with hard difficulty. Every student, even if he is not interested in English will be moved and encouraged by Helen's brave attitude. In this respect, this is a good educational movie to make students acquire the English language and rid them of their inferiority complex. I am sure that effective usage of "The Miracle Worker" will be helpful in teaching English at junior or high school level.

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"Function" is defined as the purpose for which language is used, for instance, to express anger, to invite, or to greet. It is assumed that functions are conveyed through not only linguistic information but also non-linguistic information, including kinesic and paralinguistic features. Movies, through auditory and visual channels, can be considered to be an effective tool to provide this kind of functional information. By adding English captions on the screen, functional information is presented in a three-media condition: sound, pictures, and captions. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of each medium or combination of media in understanding the different types of functions for EFL learners at different proficiency levels. A function test which consisted of 40 multiple choice questions was conducted, in 4 different conditions (sound, pictures, sound+pictures, and sound+pictures+captions), to 271 college students divided into higher and lower proficiency groups. The following results were obtained: the lower group benefited more from pictures; the higher group mostly used sound input to identify the functions, and, depending on the type of the function, also gleaned some clues from the pictures. The outcome of our study indicates that different proficiency groups have different information-processing patterns in their comprehension of functions.

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In this paper, I explain the educational value of movies as teaching material especially for writing activities done after viewing impressive movies which include social messages. Fluency of production skills in language learning are promoted as well as the motivation of the students. Furthermore, I propose that using this method works well in the areas of developing fluency, self-esteem, cooperation and interaction oriented courses. Using this supposition, I gave an intensive course for two weeks. I took up four movies entitled "Ghost", "Stella", "Sarafina" and "Dead Man Walking". After each movie the students had discussions, first in English, then in Japanese in different groups according to my questions about the message the movie had. After that, each student wrote their own opinions in English. Before this two week course, each student had written an essay. I compared that with the end composition and examined how the last one had improved. According to my analysis, the compositions were much improved in many aspects. The writing improved in the aspect of the number of words and vocabulary used, as well as in the aspect of the complexity of the sentence structures.

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The purpose of this study is to provide an idea of using movies in order to develop intercultural education in English language teaching. An increasing number of methods and ideas using movies for English education have been made so far. The limitation of using movies cannot be seen. Movies have an uncountable number of uses. As one of their many uses, this paper presents teachers how to analyze movies to distinguish the differences between Japanese culture and American culture, using a famous movie, Love Story. To analyze American movies, certain criteria which enable us to research cultural differences are necessary. Hoopes and Pusch (1979) gave good suggestions to this study for making a list of cultural analysis as a criterion. An example of cultural analysis and a method of introducing intercultural education in English language teaching are described in this study. Using movies for intercultural education can create a resource which will be very useful and effective in helping students understand cultural differences and make good use of them as a basic knowledge for their communication.

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In this study the author examined a screenplay, a novel based on the screenplay, and a simplified version paraphrased from the novel and the screenplay, as a teaching material. For this purpose, the author viewed Widdowson's Teaching Language as Communication and Barry Morrow's screenplay: Rain Man and a novel by Leonore Fleischer based on the screenplay and its simplified version retold by Kieran McGovern. As a result of the examination, the author has found that, as a screenplay consists of spoken discourses and their contexts are shown by the movie, in the simplified version paraphrased from the screenplay, there is no 'distortation of use'(Widdowson 1978:88), though it is 'the simplification of usage.' (Ibid.)

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