DVD Commentaries and Oral Literacy

I'm feeling sick today as a great wave of pestilence sweeps across our merry school. I would have taken a sick day off last week, but you know how it is ... programming requirements - gotta get to meetings, a sports / dance carnival. Hey grin and bear it baby! And that was before we all swagged it out by a campfire overnight in another school's grounds. Sometimes, you know, even when we're feeling down - living and working out in The APY Lands has its real upsides.

Anyway feeling poorly as I was this morning I lingered over that coffee and was casting my eyes through The Weekend Australian when I came across an article about alternative homebrewed DVD commentaries that appeared in Lawrie Zion's DVD Letterbox column on the 9th of September, 2006. In the article (see below) Zion refers to MMM Commentaries, an Aussie site. It occured to me what an excellent opportunity this could provide for an alternative literacy outlet - students creating their own commentary of a movie (perhaps based on their shared class reading of a text) or providing a commentary to any genre movie / documentary or whatever based on their study (for example they could take on the role of 'scholar' and explain some technical detail - or tell you why its wrong). It would certainly provide a refreshing alternative to the traditional 'my book report' format. And I think in my context, it would give students who are essentially ESL / EFL, an opportunity to construct a higher order text when they don't (mostly) have the necessary independent reading and writing skills to construct an equivalent written text. More information on Alternative DVD commentaries can be found here in a 2002 article and of course here, on Wikipedia.