Comprehension Hot Spots in Movies: Scenes and Dialogs That Are Difficult for ESL/EFL Students to Understand

When students are given control of a video or laser disk player, it has been my observation that they stop and repeat the viewing of certain passages. The reasons they would give for stopping or repeating a section was usually that they could not understand or they felt lost. I started explicitly asking the students to keep a log of these "hot spots" so that I could see how much overlap there was among the class members and to see if there were any patterns in the kinds of things that would cause auditory breakdown. Based on three years of student logs, the following factors appear to contribute to listening hot spots. The examples were gathered from student logs made while viewing the movies, The Graduate and Raiders of the Lost Ark using laser disk video players.