The King’s Speech allows us to peek into a reconstructed private world of the royal family before and during the Second World War. The carefully researched nature of the film means it offers English Language students an ideal opportunity to explore and investigate the language spoken by some of the most powerful and influential individuals of the time and to consider how their version of English might differ from our own.
The 2011 Royal Wedding and the 2012 Queen’s Diamond Jubilee will provide a wealth of contemporary sources of language spoken by the royal family with which to make valuable comparisons.
These clip activities invite students to transcribe the spoken language used in the clip to provide data from which to draw conclusions. You may prefer to allocate specific clips to different groups then to compare these as a whole class with a particular focus on the language of the royal family.