This article explores academic and industry perspectives on the use of dialect, slang, and historical language in screenwriting. It offers a chronological overview of major screenwriting manuals' treatment of dialect and slang (or lack thereof) 1946-2020. It then presents survey data of 53 currently-practicing screenwriters' views on working with…

This article explores a film education project conducted on an extra-curricular afterschool basis in a Greek secondary school in Tampouria, Piraeus. A documentarymaking project exploring the area around the school was realized by a group of ten 15-year-old students under the supervision of their English teacher/researcher. The following case study…

A very important parts of TV commercials are the messages and how they convinced people. In addition, the information given in commercials may contain messages that seem like a fact however, they may not be true. To understand these commercials it is more beneficial to observe how they say instead of what they say. In many studies (Ferreira, et…

Following Hyland's model of metadiscourse, evidential is defined as an expression that references information from other texts. Evidence in traditional academic writing may include peer-reviewed articles, published books and personal communication with field experts. With a sharp increase in the use of online teaching and learning environments by…

Conflicts over territory are about the power to establish dominant cultures in territories and are often accompanied by cultural claims to legitimacy by each side. The cultural claims, or ideologies, are often expressed in terms of "homeland" dwellers versus "intruders." Two recent movies, "Dawn of the Planet of the…

School teachers have been used as heroic characters in movies for a long time. Their heroism compensates for the failures of social life in our society by treating problems in the classroom, not the real world, and by acting as the mediators between diverse sub-cultures and the larger society. They are the agents of rationality, scholarship, and…

The figure of the vampire has been an important element of popular culture for more than a century. The movies have been a home for vampire stories, and they have presented them as unusually frightening images. A recent explosion of vampire screen works reveals a new emphasis on addressing female issues as opposed to male issues and focusing on…

Alfred Hitchcock is a major figure of popular culture. He was one of the founding fathers of the cinematic art and, together with Eisenstein and Murnau, helped define its visual language. So fruitful was he that a single film could spawn an entire genre, as "Psycho" helped create the modern horror film and "North by Northwest" the style and tone…

"King Corn" is in so many ways the story of how government food policy has entirely remade the food landscape in the United States over the last 40 years. From the massive expansion of the number of acres of corn grown across the country, to the ever-increasing ways that corn is incorporated into the food production process, to the…

Cultural diversity is often attributed to groups in a society from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Assimilation then blends subcultures into a mainstream culture. However, history and circumstance give rise to new groups whose experiences and activities produce new diversity. Big events and big changes give rise to important differences between…

In this article, the author comments on the articles in this special issue of "Innovations in Education and Teaching International (IETI)." The author recently saw a documentary called "Reel Injun: The Hollywood Indian" about the way American Indians are represented in Hollywood films. Watching this documentary amidst reading…

Three recent movies about war are examined. All have been honored by critics and welcomed by audiences. The three movies are very different from one another. They reflect different ways of thinking and feeling about war. More specifically, they represent ways we relate to the troops we send into battle and our concerns about whether we have done…

Utilizing a New Literacies Studies framework, this article presents critical lessons in film production from a multiple site case study. Examples of children's classroom experiences demonstrate how filmmaking and play come together in a process of storying--a collaborative and multimodal approach to text composition. Students in both preschool and…

Films are multimodal, often memorable, and change one's way of thinking. Films provide narratives and visual metaphors that function as tools for one's imagination and learning. No other film has amplified this phenomenon in the United States more than the "Star Wars" Cycle. "Star Wars" exemplifies the multidimensionality of…

In a world in which social media, visual images, and instant messaging are the everyday realities of today's young people, films and videos play a crucial role in developing a critical understanding of how social, economic, political, and cultural structures mediate the lives of youth. As teaching tools and cultural media, videos, and films offer…