Wednesday, February 23, 2011

A cinematic homage

My Fair Lady (1964), adapted from the Broadway musical,  is one of the best movies of the Oscar Academy and had won 8 statuetts, including Best Picture and Directing (by George Cukor). It is about an expert in phonetics, Professor Higgins (Rex Harrison), who accepts the challenge of transforming a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Dolittle (Audrey Hepburn), into a sofisticated Victorian lady. For this to happen, he has to change her accent, besides and above all the other features she has. Therefore, the movie gets really funny when we get to see the efforts of Professor Higgins to teach what seems to be impossible when it comes to Eliza (who has no moods whatsoever). Let us see one scene which shows two of her problems: substitution of "ei" for "ai" and lack of the aspirated "h":


That is why I like and recomend this movie so much. In addition to being really hilarious, it provides us with something we (teachers) may find in our classes: of course not a cockney person (who knows!), but certainly students who deal with dire difficulties about the pronunciation of the English languge.

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