The suspicion

2006

Lecturers
Students

Arts & Music
Business & Communication
International Relations
Teacher Education

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

Portuguese

Any language

B1
B2
C1
C2

Animation
Activity/task
Video

Vocabulary
Prosody

Listening
Speaking
Critical Thinking
Writing
Mediation

The short film A Suspeita (The suspicion) (Portugal, 2000) features a train journey in Portugal. This journey has four main characters and one secondary character. Among the possibilities of content to be explored in this film are the rich dialogues between the characters, the actions of people on a train, the work of the conductor (“pica”), and the deconstruction of stereotypes previously created by us and society.
This resource was used with levels B1, B2, C1 and C2 as there are several dialogues that students can interpret. In addition, they can relate to the journeys they have already made in the country, as well as the terms related to trains and the like.

1. The online resource, which is 25 minutes long, was used in several steps, which will be described in detail in the following point (Guidelines).
The questions raised were about film genres, lexicon about travelling (by train or otherwise) and reactions provoked on a journey.
As a final activity, students were asked to make a detailed description of what they saw in the story. To do this, they should give names to the characters and describe them in detail. They should also think of a moral or lesson for the story.
This activity was very positive because, to the teacher's surprise, the students were very creative in their summaries of the stories and were rich and precise in details.

Step 1 - Firstly, students were asked about the genres of films they most like or prefer and asked to give some examples.
Step 2 - In a second step, they were to associate the title of the film with the film genre and then confirm.
Step 3 -Then, in addition to saying the setting in which it takes place and the number of characters, students were prompted to describe the characters physically and psychologically.
Step 4 -Students were also asked to describe the characters' lines, to say the country and city of origin of the train and its destination.
Step 5 - As an evaluation, students were asked to give an accurate description of the facts that occurred on the trip.