Language learning in the age of satellite television

The advent of satellite television worldwide has led to a huge increase in the number of channels available. For the first time in the history of television as a mass medium, language learners can eavesdrop on the most popular information and entertainment medium of the target culture. But what is there to be learnt from this resource, and how can learners and teachers make the most of it? This book explores the relationship between language and culture, focusing on some of the most frequent and popular genres shown on television such as news, game shows, soap operas and adverts. The author shows how these genres can provide the potential for developing language learning. She discusses and illustrates different strategic approaches, and includes suggestions for teaching and learning.

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Satellite TV: a new resource for language and cultural learning
• Satellite TV and its genres
• Culture and language learning
• 2. TV news
• News comprehension and recall
• World knowledge and the foreign learner
• The structuring of TV news
• Learning how to learn from TV news
• 3. Game shows
• Game shows in Europe
• The patterns of game shows
• The language of game shows
• 4. Soap operas
• TV fiction
• Open-ended serials
• Socio-cultural realism and the learner
• Recursive structure: repetition with variation
• Secondary and tertiary texts
• 5. TV adverts
• Adverts as cultural history
• Constructing otherness through adverts
• The language of adverts
• Appendix 1
• Practical suggestions for teaching and learning
• General advice for all learners
• Generic activities
• TV news
• Game shows
• Soap operas
• TV adverts
• Appendix 2
• Original transcripts
• Bibliography
• Index