COSTA MESA : English Lessons Captured on Video

Clad in a bright pink T-shirt, Julia Johnson walks across the film set, a cityscape decorated in soft blue, green and pink pastels. She stops in front of an open window where Jose Medina sits waiting for his cue.

“Do you need a mouth?” Johnson says carefully, gesturing to the camera with a wide smile. “No,” Jose answers loudly, motioning to the clown mask on his face, “I have a mouth.”

It looks like a scene out of “Sesame Street.” But the film being shot at Costa Mesa High School this week isn’t for the preschool crowd. In fact it isn’t even for children in the United States.

“Open Door to English,” a set of 32 video lessons under production, will eventually find its way into dozens of Korean schools to help children there learn the English language. It is a series of basic English lessons with an American twist.

“Teaching English is so boring. You have to repeat the same words over and over again,” said Peggy Hollingsworth, a retired schoolteacher and one of the producers. “We tried to take a grammar lesson and make as pleasant a learning experience as possible.”

Hollingsworth became interested in video production after trying to make lessons exciting for her English as a second language students. She was hired by In-hwan Kim, who oversees seven language schools in Korea, to help bring English to his country.

He does not have much time. Under a mandate of the Korean government, all schools must have an English program in place before 1994.

So how do you teach Korean children, whose learning style is vastly different from American children, the subtleties of the English language without putting them to sleep by repeating the same words over and over again?

Simple, Hollingsworth says. Give them a mini-movie lesson complete with a small plot and a few simple sentences. Throw in five colorful characters, a city street for a set, and sing.

“Even though you can’t remember the classmates names who you went to school with many years ago, you can remember the songs you learned years ago,” said Kim, who has already introduced sing-teaching and the use of video learning in his country. “Students can learn better when they can practice through singing.”

On Friday, the cast rehearsed Lesson Seven, designed to teach the different parts of the face.

In the background, director Art Vitarelli and Hollingsworth watched for the slightest mistake in pronunciation. Earlier in the day, they had spent several minutes redoing a scene, when the children, influenced by the background blues music, picked up a Louisiana twang.

Meanwhile, Leia Kim of Westminster sits in an upstairs window on the set, watching the scene below her unfold. Kim, along with Medina, of Huntington Beach, Kafi Battersby of Long Beach and Jeff Tucker of Orange, were chosen to be the child teachers for the project. Johnson, a Laguna Beach resident, is the only adult.

While taking a break in the action, the children, all professional actors, talk about their stint. “It is definitely work,” Tucker said. “But it’s neat because you are teaching these guys English from scratch. Who knows, we might be famous in Korea.”