Eat,+Pray,+Love

Eat Pray Love is an inspiring movie, which adapted from a non-fiction novel. It talks about Elizabeth’s travelling experiences to Italy, India and Bali after her divorce with her husband in New York. The movie explores Elizabeth’s personal reflection on the values of life in each place. Firstly, she discovered the art of dining is a way to make people grateful and proud of their cultural identity. She learned how to speak Italian and started a care-free journey in several magnificent European countries. Besides, Elizabeth contemplated the virtue of religion and had a new interpretation of life when chatting with a humorous monk in India. Life is a series of cycles that drive people to wait for the things that they pursue, pray for their fortune and misfortune as well as realize how precious they are to the people they love and love them in return. After that, Elizabeth found her true love in Bali (one of the resort Islands in Indonesia) and ended her trip to the fullest. Eat Pray Love articulates several dilemmas and struggles of living in modern century. It discusses the values of family and relationship and the limitation of oneself to accomplish dreams and cope with reality.
 * Summary of the film: **

**Grade levels/courses:** This movie is a suitable teaching material for secondary 4 to 5 students who age 16 to 17 in Hong Kong. It could be taught in academic [|English classes] or liberal studies. Other courses for which it might also be appropriate: It may also be plausible to demonstrate this movie in film studies or literature adaptation classes. In this regard, teachers can talk about the filming techniques, narrative structure as well as the lexical and syntactic changes of script in contrast with the original novel. Specifically, the reasons for the film producers to revise the arrangements of plots and how do they condense the story plots in an economic manner. Thus, students would be able to learn the skills of adding and editing script, characters and events. **Main ideas/ teaching points:** //Social knowledge// //The stereotyping of gender// At the beginning of this movie, it mentions the power struggle between Elizabeth and her husband. This is because her husband fed up with the fact that Elizabeth preferred to work to accompany him. In this regard, it depicts the contemporary practice of business women that challenges the traditional role and norm of gender. As our classmates mentioned in their presentations, educators should have catered the needs of both male and female students while choosing the appropriate teaching materials. Eat Pray Love is a movie best suited for teenage boys and girls because they can feel comfortable to put themselves into different characters’ perspectives. Moreover, it involves several issues that commonly find in teenage life such as management of time, the pursuit of dream and the dilemma of being an individual and learning to take care of others. //The stereotyping of culture//

Teaching English does not merely limit in linguistic or pragmatic contexts, it can extend to the teaching of global knowledge like the cultural belief and stereotype of certain countries or ethnical groups. This movie aims to present a multidimensional view of various cultural routine and practice such as the eating habit in Italy, the culture and motto of prayers in India as well as the geographical significance of Bali. As one of our classmates mentioned in her presentation, it is necessary for teachers to associate the learning content with students’ existing knowledge. Specifically, I will foreground the movie by asking my students to write down the relevant adjectives, nouns or verbs that suit to describe Italy, India and Bali. In this sense, it can activate learners’ schema and more importantly help them to make connotation to the literal words. Topical knowledge //Family value// I am so impressed with what our classmates said in their presentations. Teaching should be built upon learners’ familiarity of topics. Family, in all senses, is a universal topic that commonly shared by learners at all ages. However, Elizabeth in this movie tended to outweigh her career to her family. It could be a good counter example for students to reflect on the meaning of having an intimate, harmonious and supportive family. For instance, they are required to share their view regarding the choice of Elizabeth to prioritize her family and neglect the importance of building a happy family. //Religion value// This movie also throws a light to the exquisite spirit of Indian religion. Students would be able to understand the religion practice of Indian people, such as how they perceive their pre-life, while-life and post-life and their belief in daily consumption of fortune and misfortune. They regard luck and misfortune as two polar and view life as a form of calculation to determine one’s goodness and badness after their deaths. It would be quite thought-provoking to ask students whether or not they agree with or support such religion motto by providing sensible references. //The pursuit of dream versus the realization of life// The intrinsic value illustrated in this film is one’s pursuit of dream and reflection of life. By watching Elizabeth’s travelling experiences, students are introduced with three different attitudes of life. Life is in fact composed by duties, relaxation, blessing and value of our loved ones. Particularly, students aged 16 to 17 would be able to make use of their critical thinking to identify, analyze and prioritize the important aspects of life. I would hold a pair activity to require students select their priorities of having a balanced life such as family, lover, work, study, religion, dining, vacation as well as their short-term and long-term goals. Cultural knowledge //Dining culture in Italy// Students would be able to see the dining culture in Italy, such as the Italian dishes, variety of food and drinking habit of Italian people. In addition, learners have the chance to take a look with the Italian streets, restaurants and eating environment. They can thus compare the Eastern eating culture to the Western one and come up with their individual dining preferences. //Religion belief in India// Religion, in a certain extent, is a mean to lead people to positive thinking and desirable behaviors. This film aims to present how religion belief has a crucial influence on Elizabeth’s perception on her life. I would take advantage of Indian belief in religion to hold a small-scale debate among classmates. They have to vote whether they stand for or against Indian religion practice and articulate at least two reasons why or why not they think in such ways. Textual knowledge //The narrative structure// Students would be more aware of the narrative pattern of writing a novel and producing a film. Significantly, I would ask my students to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of adopting first person and third person narrative in novels and films. Learners are encouraged to respond by drawing tangible and reliable evidences from the film and novel. In this way, they can filter available and appropriate information to strengthen their observation and opinions. //Characterization// There are distinguishing discrepancies of novel and film to develop the appearance, personalities and attitude of characters. In this regard, students would mainly concentrate on summarizing the descriptive significance of characters in the film, such as in what way they are depicted and why they are presented in such ways. For example, learners can use a spider map to relate their answers to some cultural and personal background of the story so that they have an all-rounded analysis of both characters and other dramatic elements and effect. //The development of plots// Students would have chance to investigate the arrangement of events, such as the time frame and narration of contexts and relationship between characters. From a commercial point of view, it is necessary to reorganize the plots so as to extract worth-watching scenes that appeal to general audience. Learners are then asked to discuss the use of filming and transitional techniques like flashback and sudden change of scenes in Eat Pray Love. Specifically, they can study the merits and drawbacks of composing the story into three distinctive elements (Eat, Pray and Love) and its comprehensiveness of concepts through this special arrangement. Issues/challenges of teaching the text: It is so hard for student to digest three cultural contexts in such short period of time (the length of movie is only 133 minutes). It would be more difficult if students do not have a decent understanding of different cultural settings such as its distinctive characteristics and cultural routines. In this regard, I have to spend time familiarizing students with the geographic, religion as well as the national beliefs in Italy, India and Bali respectively. According to one of my professors’ teaching experience in York University, the ‘pause’ button is in fact a powerful mean to have a clear cut of the movie and assist students to review, reflect and resemble the major ideas mentioned within particular segments of film. Thus, I would adopt a ‘back-and-forth’ approach to revisit the important plots in Eat Pray Love and hold a literature circle that welcome students to express their personal opinions about that specific scenes. Moreover, it would be quite challenging to teach a movie, which is modified by a non-fiction novel. Since there is a concern of time limit of producing a film, it involves a considerable amount of revision and amendment of plots, characters and development of story. It would be quite inspiring yet complicated to go through all the adaptation choices that the film producers have made. As one of our classmates encountered the similar difficulty during her practicum, the problem would be better solved by dividing students into peer learning groups so that they can exchange ideas regarding the content, organization, the use of dialogues and other lexical and syntactic significance of script between the novel and the film. Specifically, students are encouraged to study an assigned area and share with their classmates at the end of the lesson. On one hand, it can save my time to go through the editing elements one by one in classes. On the other hand, a comparison between reading novel and watching movie would be a good stimulation as students would be able to develop their unique points of views and interpretation that are different from their peers. In other words, students would be very much benefit from their fellows’ statements.

Assignment / Activity ** Summary **

** Summary ** Eat Pray