Story Shorts: Using films to teach literacy

Reading images, writing words

Writing is a key area for the National Literacy Strategy, especially since standards appeared not to rise in step with reading attainment after the first year of the strategy's implementation. The evaluation feedback from teachers in the Story Shorts pilot suggested an interesting link between the use of moving image texts and children's writing skills. One advisory teacher from Solihull specifically targeted elements of writing in her teaching with a small group of underachieving boys.

She characterised the boys she worked with as passive linguists – they could talk about language, structure and character with some degree of confidence, but couldn't write about them. Their focus was to translate the rich sounds and colours of the film and to reflect shifts in camera position through descriptive prose. The task was to write out the story of El Caminante for younger pupils who would not have access to the film. They looked at some examples of written texts to reflect on how concepts used in film, such as close-up, scene setting and plot development, had an equivalency in written language. Results were very encouraging, with individual written responses being more sustained. There was also a greater use of paragraphing and what the teacher described as 'a distinct visuality to their work. They picked up detail from the film and translated that to their writing'.

Other teachers remarked on this transference of visual detail from screen to page. 'The children learnt to interpret a film in the same way we interpret a text and that's something new. They took all the bits of the film they could visualise and talk about and used them in their writing – not just writing about the film, I mean all their fictional writing.'

Whether this implied residual effect of Story Shorts is as lasting as the teacher felt it would be remains to be seen. Standards can only ever be properly assessed over longer periods of time but, in terms of effectiveness, her comments suggest an increased confidence not only on the part of the pupils but also in her own ability to work with visual texts. That in itself is a significant development and confounds the view that the visual arts and moving image media in particular will only ever be the preserve of committed individual enthusiasts.

Another teacher commented on the way repeated viewings of the same short film provoked new 'ways of seeing'; '…every single time they saw these films they saw something different … they understood that the same object can represent different things. Now they routinely use a thesaurus for new words'.