You can give a huge boost to your English speaking and listening skills through watching movies and TV shows. Many times while watching a movie or a TV show, we get caught up in the flow of the story and a part of our mind remains in that imaginary world with “the end” text appearing on the screen. In fact, some of us can’t stop wondering what it would feel like to meet the characters we watch or be in their place. For this reason, we pay utmost attention to every detail in the movies/TV shows. Moreover, thanks to this attention, we try to understand the dialogues in the movie word for word and repeat the lines of our favorite characters. This passion, consciously or unwittingly, helps us to improve our English skills.
One of the most important reason that makes watching movies suitable for improving English is that it is a fun activity. Beginners can use subtitles from their native language when watching movies in their original language (or exact opposite) to learn new idioms, phrases, words and understand how they are used in real conversations. If they want, they can rewind or fast forward the film and be more careful where they don’t understand. In addition, advanced English speakers may use native subtitles or no subtitles at all. More importantly, when you go back to study English or going to have a conversation in English, you need to keep alive the gains from this activity. For this purpose, you should strive to continue your English studies without interruption and to practice as much as possible.
We begin our list with two famous classics from 1950’s: On the Waterfront (1954) starring Marlon Brando and 12 Angry Men (1957) with great Henry Fonda. The best feature of these movies for English learners is both movies consist of natural and powerful dialogues. In the first movie, you will see how the main character fights back against the corrupt union boss. 12 Angry Men is a courtroom drama focuses on a jury’s deliberations in a murder case. Moreover, it can be regarded as a single-set production movie which means all the story happens just in one place. Thus, it provides plenty of monologues and dialogues during the screen time.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is a movie based on the true story and it’s about an armed robbery that didn’t go as planned. The best thing about this movie is all the dialogues were improvised which means it is possible to hear very natural English from actors. As we mentioned above, single-set production movies are very rich in terms of monologues and dialogues. The Man from Earth (2007) is also can be regarded in this category. Its story begins with a college professor “John Oldman” becomes a subject to mysterious interrogation when he reveals to his colleagues that he is thousands of years old.
The last suggestion is very useful in terms of getting familiar with different English accents. First, Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is an epic historical drama that tells the story of the fall of Jerusalem during the 12th century. In the movie, there are many characters from different nations which makes it very easy to distinguish between different English accents.