Love Actually: activities, ideas, vocabulary

Image source:
www.universalstudiosentertainment.com

I use a lot of films in my teaching: not just occasional Youtube clips but full-length authentic feature films, and I’ve been wanting for a while to start a new section on this blog where I would upload my film-based materials. I thought December would be a suitable time to share materials for many people’s favourite Christmas film Love Actually.
Warning: some scenes are suitable for adults only

Activities actually

The activities are divided into three parts. They are not particularly imaginative - mainly questions to answer while watching. Feel free to adapt them.
Pages 1-2 are for the first part of the film (until 4 weeks to Christmas title appears )
Pages 3-8  focus on various characters. You can divide the class into 4 groups and assign each group different characters. Because it's quite a big chunk of the film (more than an hour) students can watch this part at home.
Alternatively, you can focus on (a pair of) characters each lesson with the whole class - this is what I normally do - but it involves lots of skipping back and forth to select the scenes with the character(s) you need.
Page 9 is for the final scenes of the film (from Christmas Eve title onward)

  Download all the pages here Love Actually ALL or preview them below:

Some ideas actually

Split-viewing
Throughout the film there are a lot of opportunities for split-viewing. You can either ask half the class to turn their backs to the TV/screen or go out of the classroom. The other half have to describe to them what is happening - or what happened. For example, this scene where Jamie and Aurelia jump into the pond to save the manuscript:



Press conference
Before you watch the press-conference scene with the British PM and American president, pause the video and get your students to role play the press conference. Nominate two students who will play the roles of the two politicians. Other students acting as journalists ask them questions.
You can also send the journalists out of the class to work on the questions (split-viewing) so that they don't see the scene immediately preceding the press conference (when the US President kisses Natalie). It always make for a fun role play as the two students playing the roles of the PM and President will be the only ones who know what really happened.

Dictogloss
Harry buys a necklace - see the lesson plan HERE

Sound off
There are a number of scenes you can play with the sound off and ask your students to guess what's happening or write a dialogue for the scene. For example, the scene when Juliet calls on Mark to look for a videotape.

Songs
There are lots of songs from the film soundtrack you can bring to class. For example, "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell - great for discussion about love and life.

Reading
This article has a great overview of the film summarising the main storylines:
10 reasons why Love Actually actually should be your cinematic Christmas tradition

Vocabulary actually

The whole script of the film can be found HERE. I have highlighted in green and in pink some lexical items (words and phrases) that you might want to focus on in class.

There is also a Quizlet set (click HERE) which contain the items highlighted in green (plus some extra words thrown in) for additional practice and review. Alternatively, you may want to do it as a pre-watching activity.

Hope your students not only enjoy watching the film but learn some language too!

Looking for more video-based activities? 

Click HERE for activities based on short clips