Indexical relations and sound motion pictures in L2 curricula: The dynamic role of the teacher

Well-chosen sound motion pictures (SMPs) can be excellent language teaching tools for presenting facts and providing comprehensible input in the target language. They give access to content and authentic surface forms in the target language as well as to the associations between them. SMPs also allow repeated exposures, but they are rarely exploited fully. Here we argue that indexical relations of three kinds are critical to language acquisition and to the use of SMPs: (1) objective indexes emanating from material bodily objects to observers, (2) subjective indexes projected from observers onto bodily objects, and (3) symbolic indexes marking linguistic associations between the surface forms of the target language and their referents as well as relations between all of these. The teacher plays an essential role in helping the language learner to discover, establish, and develop the crucial indexical relations owing to the dynamic nature of these relations.