London

A friend of mine rang me up from Sloane Square in London, where he is having a short break.  The weather has been kind.  His only real comment on the big city was that it is full of haves and have nots.  The haves have lots and lots according to him, whereas the have nots seem to be hovering around the wrong side of the breadline.

I know that house prices have become prohibitive in the land of beer and fish and chips, although looking at salary levels, whereas they seem OK when you are a city whiz, for the average person, I wonder how ever they will be able to survive, let alone have children and other such mundane everyday things.  Still, at least you can get credit very easily in the UK.  Not sure about being able to pay all this easy money back though.  The Economist  had an interesting article about the number of disadvantaged, read poorly qualified and badly paid, white Englishmen there were in the UK.  It seems as though they, these white chaps, are being left behind by the much more aspirational immigrant classes, who aim to better themselves and not to be ‘working class’ and proud of it.  There is nothing wrong with being working class, but if it does not pay the bills, then aiming a little higher may not be such a bad thing.  And the BBC wrote about ASBOs becoming something every young thug should have to up his (or her) street cred.  What a wonderful society.  Something, somewhere is not being done right.

Maybe Thatcher started the ball rolling, but Blair has done very little to stop it.  As for Cameron, well, I don’t hold out much hope - maybe he’ll aim for an ASBO so he can up his street cred with the voters he wants.

Cool today

The weather is noticeably cooler than yesterday and there is a cold breeze whistling around Milan - winter is on its way.  In compensation, the wind has blown away a good deal of the smog and the sky is a joy to behold.  It is a wonderful intense blue, the kind of colour I have only really ever seen in Italy.

How watching TV can develop your language skills

Are there any types doing a PhD reading this blog? I doubt it, they would not find much of interest here, unless they are doing sociology perhaps.

Anyway, as you may know, I teach English for a living and I am forever hammering on about the benefits of regularly watching English language TV to my students. I also explain that even though they may believe that they are only understanding a tiny bit of what is being said, this is not true because their brains are absorbing and connecting a lot more than they think.

Watching TV regularly, even terrible Italian TV, does seem to be beneficial for language learners. It’s not too difficult to understand why when you think about it.

Firstly, you stand a chance of hearing all the vocabulary you know and then some in a very short space of time and your brain will go ‘I know that word’ and its level in the ranking in the ‘familiarly used words category’ in your brain will increase. In simple terms you will remember this word more easily and thus be able to understand it when it is spoken and probably use it.

Another good reason for watching TV is the visual correlation between the language used and the context in which it is used, especially in action sequences. For some reason our brains find pictures very stimulating and thus find it easier to connect words to actions - the net result being you can understand more because the combination of words and pictures allows you to understand the context. Telephone conversations scare learners simply because they cannot see who they are speaking to.

Need more reasons/excuses to watch TV? OK, when you are learning another language you often have one or two teachers. This means you will become familiar with the language spoken by others who have the same accent/personality, but you may be stumped by someone saying the same things, but with a different accent. Enter TV, again. On TV you get to hear a huge variety of regional accents which, after a time, almost automatically raises your ability to comprehend a language when it is spoken by someone you do not know.

There are many other advantages, probably too many to list here, but what I would like to know is whether anyone has ever studied/analysed the effects of TV watching on language learners. If the answer is yes, can you let me know where I can read this study?

If no-one has done such a study, then could they give this idea some thought. The benefits of such a study would be more efficient listening materials or even establishing a link between exactly how many hours of listening are required to reach a certain level of comprehension.

Oh and TV is good because there are generally no subtitles. If you want to know how good your comprehension is becoming, listen to the radio in your target language. If you can understand everything, then your comprehension skills are excellent.

With regard to English language TV, Italy has a problem. The availability of English language TV here is limited to BBC World, if you have Fastweb digi TV and whatever you get with Sky.

In my not so humble opinion the Italian government should provide everyone with a selection of foreign language TV stations, but then I always have been something of an idealist.