Abstract:

Teaching Foreign Languages is a worldwide extended topic due to the fact that multiculturalism embraces nowadays society and globalisation easies relationships between cultures.
The teachers’ role in the classroom focuses on engaging students to the learning of a language in a communicative way. Even though new approaches for teaching-learning foreign languages have been created and implemented, there is still the hardest part of a language, grammar, which students and teachers cannot avoid and is sometimes taught separately from the four skills (reading-comprehension, listening, writing, speaking).
Some teachers decide not to follow lesson plans in which the four skills are implemented due to the lack of time thoroughout the school year in order to accomplish the goals agreed in the syllabus.
The decision of teaching grammar independently raises also the matter of teaching culture as an isolated topic, using texts and/or audio-visual materials which leave aside some skills and do not develop the grammatical competence. Furthermore it is also concerning the fact that some parts of culture, due to the gap in time between them and our present, are left aside, forgotten, and the impression given is that there is either a lack of knowledge from teachers or that there is a lack of appropriate materials for the development of lesson plans to teach that side of culture.
This paper aims to present a for some people already known way of approaching grammar and culture together, making it easier for teachers to implement both elements while engaging students: the use of cinema.
However the intention of this presentation is not only approaching grammar through culture, but also focusing on a side of Hispanic culture which has not been researched yet or implemented in the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language: Luis Buñuel’s cinema. This internationally well-known director has left a legacy of films that carry not only part of Hispanic and French culture and represent Surrealism, but also a whole range of topics applicable to all societies in which Buñuel criticises mankind and human nature. This last point makes him and his cinema approachable to all kinds of cultures. Therefore and even though his films have been regarded as difficult materials to implement in the Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language, it has been considered that Luis Buñuel and his cinema productions as cultural references, are essential in the scope that this paper presents.
Thus this presentation will show how the film Él (1953) has been taken as a study case and put into practice in the class to prove that Buñuel’s cinema can be successfully implemented in the Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language.

References:
Buñuel, Luis (1982). Mi último suspiro. México: Plaza y Janés.
Buñuel, Luis, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Garrett White (2002). An Unspeakable Betrayal. California: University of California Press.
Estévez, Manuela and Yolanda Fernández (2006) El componente cultural en el aula de E/LE. Programa de autoformación y perfeccionamiento del profesorado. Madrid: Edelsa.
Fuentes, Víctor (1993). Buñuel en México. Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses.
Gutiérrez-Albilla, Julián Daniel (2008) Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema. University of Michigan: Tauris Academic Studies.

Keywords:

Teaching, Foreign Languages, Film, Luis Buñuel.