Pedagogo veiklos tobulinimo galimybės, mokant antrosios užsienio (vokiečių) kalbos: filmų užsienio kalba aspektas
ENThe European Commission actively promotes linguistic diversity. In addition to their native languages, European citizens should be able to communicate in at least two foreign languages (Gelūnas, 2015; Walczak-Niewiadomska, 2015). Moreover, globalization processes bring to language classes such innovations like teaching a second foreign language (German) using English as lingua franca. This idea brings a challenge to a foreign language teacher, because in order to be effective, teachers have to expand their roles, change training/teaching methods and the content of curriculum material. For this reason, it is particularly important to provide interesting, relevant and motivating material which would enable learners make their learning German active, promote their improvement not only in German but in English as well and develop individual learning and self-assessment skills (Leonaviciene, Saliene, 2013). To monitor all these processes, teachers should be not only educators but researchers as well. Action research is a powerful tool for changing and improving both teaching and learning partners: a teacher and a student. The methodological scope of the action research is impressive. It can be used in almost any setting where a problem, tasks and procedures cry out for mutual solution of a teacher and a learner (Cohen, Manion, Morrison, 2007). After fulfilling a diagnostic stage of the action research that analyzed students’ language acquisition level and their expectations about learning German as a second language, the authors of this research paper have chosen the method of applying movies in the original language. This method is analyzed by many authors (Blell, Leutge, 2008). The action research question was how to help English students to improve their German speaking skills while watching movies. This question implied such activities as listening comprehension, interpretation, subtitling, and independent sound recording.At the end of the action research, the following advantages of the method were revealed: students stated that they improved not only German but English as well; it was easier to memorize vocabulary when watching movies in original (German) language and comparing it to English when a phrase was associated with an image and sound and to develop listening and speaking skills. Weak points were highlighted as well: students were not able to hear everything and it was difficult to understand and translate idioms.
