"Sounding Harry Out" : Socio-cultural Aspects of Teaching English through Movies

This paper will look at socio-cultural aspects of the movie that we consider critical to enhancing the appreciation of movies: that is, "gaps" in socio-cultural knowledge. As is often the case, native speakers or language teachers tend to take socio-cultural factors for granted. But in order to understand the target or native language well they are very important, because they convey reasons or help explain the way the story goes. To illustrate this, we chose Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as our target movie and focused on British and Japanese linguistic contexts. First, we will identify two key areas, names and accents, and then we will look at ways in which the Japanese version of the movie has attempted to accommodate these aspects. We will find the factors lying beneath two cultures or languages. Throughout the paper, we provide ideas for teachers who wish to improve their students' socio-cultural knowledge.