How watching TV can develop your language skills

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November 2, 2006· Filed Under Italian 

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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.

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