I’ve previously posted two “The Best…” lists that are related to this one.

The Best Online Video Sites For Learning English primarily, though not exclusively, shares sites that show videos that have been explicitly produced to help viewers learn English.

The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL lists the best commercial television programs and movies that can be used to teach English in the classroom, along with sharing teacher resources to use with them.

Today’s list is focused on sites that specifically use movie trailers from commercial films online,  and then combine them with interactive exercises to help students learn English. This list used to be considerably longer, but several sites I listed in the original post have gone out of business since that time.

I’ve found that my students love this combination of popular culture with English-language-learning, which is why I decided another “The Best…” list was in order.  In addition to using commercial movie trailers as a language development activity, sites had to meet two other criteria in order for me to include them here:

* The trailers used had to be appropriate for classroom use.

* The sites had to use videos that were not YouTube-based, since those videos are blocked by most school district content filters.

Here are my choices For the Best Sites That Use Movie Trailers to Teacher English:

Number three is a combination of two sites — ESL Video and Your Local Cinema Subtitled Trailers.  They don’t quite meet my criteria, though.  ESL Video is a great site that allows you to create your own quiz for pretty much any embedded video on the Internet.  The majority appear to be from YouTube, but it would be easy for a teacher to embed one of the many trailers on the Your Local Cinema site and quickly create your own quiz.  You just have to click on “subtitles added at overstream.net,” which is right below the trailer once you click on it.

Number two is English Online France, which has trailers and quite challenging exercises for about thirteen films.

Number one is Lingual Net. It has a large variety of movie clips, and a very structured and accessible process for using them to learn English (sometimes, though, it does take awhile to load).

Simple English Videos was recently begun by veteran ESL/EFL teacher Vicki Hollett. You can read her description of the free site here. The engaging videos, most which appear to be movie trailers, have “clickable” transcripts.

Movie Trailer Listening Lessons is from David Deubelbeiss.

You can find these sites, along with others that didn’t make the list, on my website under Videos.

As always, feedback is welcome.

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