This is a beautiful, sad song about the life of an immigrant that lives and works alone (presumably in the US) for many years to provide for his wife and son that live in another country.
The music video, as you can see, tells the story visually even without understanding the lyrics, and so it is perfect for MovieTalk. We watched it (with the volume muted) and used MovieTalk to preview it before we watched it with the volume turned up, did an activity to interpret the lyrics, and discussed the content. If you are interested in using the lyrics activity that I created (students match segments of the lyrics with student-friendly descriptions) or the discussion questions that I wrote, you can download the activity here.
What is MovieTalk?
Ooh! I am so glad you asked!! It is a strategy used in FOCAL skills for teaching ESL, and Michele Whaley discovered it and has introduced it to the world of World Languages.
To see one of my MovieTalk demos, visit this link: http://martinabex.com/tprs/demo/ . For more information about MovieTalk, please visit this link http://martinabex.com/2013/01/11/movie-talk/ or watch the demos (three YouTube clips) at the bottom of this blog post.by Michele Whaley (demos by my former intern, Julia Stutzer: http://mjtprs.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/friday-tprs-meeting/ )