The Role of Film Screening in New Methods of Teaching Literary Texts: Teaching The Shahnameh

Combining the traditional teaching approach with the new audio-visual teaching methods can, apart from smoothing out the learning process, meet the hitherto less-considered objectives in the emotional area. The present interdisciplinary is of an applied characteristic in objective, and descriptive-evaluative in nature and method. The statistical sample includes all the 11-grade students in secondary schools in Torbat-e Jám from among whom 60 were selected within a cluster sampling framework. The measurement was done by means of screening the puppet play "The Legend of the Snake-Shouldered" (Afsanehe-Mardoosh) in teaching the lesson "Kaveh the Justice Seeker" (Kaveh-e Dadkhah) in the Persian textbook of the 11th grade of the secondary schools and a questionnaire which was organized into three categories: Category A, the completion and stability of the learning process in the cognitive and skill areas in teaching; category B, the emotional, motivational, and modeling areas; and category C, questions that assess the film's audio-visual capabilities in the course of learning the lesson. The data were analyzed through T-single sample. The results obtained show that the screening of the film has a high impact on students' desire to and interest in familiarity with the Shahnameh, gaining Iranian identity, modeling the characters in the Shahnameh. The greatest effect is on the students' desire to use pure Iranian names and words. The film screening has a high impact on the completion and stability of students' learning and skills; but the audio-visual effects of the film are not of high quality.