Editorial
You may also wish to read another article by Georgina Hudson published in HLT:
Teaching English at University Level: How to Make It a Memorable Experience when Reading Comprehension and Grammar Instruction Prevail
Sitcoms: a Window of Opportunity for Teaching and Learning
Marisa Mechetti and Georgina Hudson, Argentina
Marisa Mechetti is both a teacher of English and a Literary, Technical and Scientific translator. She also holds a university degree in TEFL. In the last twelve years she has been teaching mainly adults in companies and at college. Her main interests include: teaching ESP and developing materials based on authentic texts.
Georgina Hudson is both a Teacher of English and a Teacher of Spanish as a Foreign Language. She has taught these languages for 15 years in countries like Argentina, France and the UK. She currently teaches English at college level. She’s published several blogs for the BBC & British Council:
www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/georginahudson
E-mail: hudsongeorgina@gmail.com
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Introduction
Background
Examples:Using sitcoms in the classroom…
Discussion and conclusion
References
In this article we aim to explore a type of authentic video material, the situation comedy (sitcom), as a powerful tool to improve the listening skills of English language learners and enhance their acquisition process. As part of this exploration, we will concentrate on the benefits of the inclusion of sitcoms in the class, the criteria which might be followed to choose them as well as the viewing approaches and tasks which can be used to fully exploit them. We finally conclude that apart from being a source of real life language, cultural references and fun, sitcoms are user-friendly due to their brevity and simplicity. The key to using this type of material effectively is dependent on the creation of appropriate tasks that support and develop learners’ linguistic competences.
Situation comedies (sitcoms) can be turned into an effective teaching and learning resource in adult EFL/ESL classes. In order to do this, we will be focusing on the perceived benefits associated with the use of this type of authentic material and the tasks which can be devised based upon it.
Michael Lewis’s (1996:2) assumption that “it is the quality and quantity of the input to which the learners are exposed which is the single most important factor in their progress” is widely supported nowadays with many teachers exposing their students to a variety of authentic texts from different sources. However, we feel that this type of exposure is far more productive when accompanied by appropriate and thorough exploitation. This belief has inspired and moved us to incorporate authentic video material, mainly sitcoms, into the classroom not just to develop students’ listening skills but to help them in the language acquisition process.
In our experience, sitcoms not only present learners with meaningful material where language is embedded in real contexts of language use but also give teachers the chance to design tasks to fully exploit that language from different perspectives.
A situation comedy, a specific genre of television, is a kind of comedy which has a storyline and features recurring characters that act in common situations such as a family, workplace, or a group of friends.
The main reasons for which we favour sitcoms over other authentic video materials are the following:
- They provide students with a great deal of contextualised linguistic, paralinguistic and authentic cross-cultural information.
- They promote active viewing and serve as a springboard for integrating the four skills.
- They can be used as a trigger for meaning-focus and form-focus activities into the class.
- They provide a realistic and meaningful context and deal with contemporary issues that are relevant to students' lives.
- Unlike two-hour feature films, sitcom episodes do not pose the problem of overload of vocabulary/linguistic structure and length.
- They are enjoyable and relevant to learners' appreciation of popular culture.
- They raise awareness of cultural differences and pragmatics.
- They lead students to have a few hearty laughs thus making the classroom atmosphere more relaxed and favourable for learning the target language.
Selecting a sitcom:
There is a great deal of successful British and American sitcoms available on DVD or even on Youtube. Now, what criteria should be taken into account when choosing one?
We have found two of Nuttall´s (1996) principles for text selection to be the most important factors: suitability of content and exploitability.
Suitability of content can be considered to be of paramount importance in that the sitcom should be of interest to students as well as relevant to their needs. Moreover, we consider it sensible to avoid shows which contain inappropriate or even controversial language, content and themes.
Exploitability refers to how the text can be used as the basis for tasks aimed at developing the students´ competence as viewers, listeners and language users.
Active viewing
How can we encourage students to become active viewers? Making use of different approaches and techniques is key to active viewing.
The whole episode approach, which shows the episode in its entirety in a single viewing, mainly enhances students' listening strategies such as listening for gist (key words and main ideas), guessing meaning from context and inferring strategies by visual clues, facial expressions, voice, and sound track. We strongly believe this approach to be more realistic and motivating for students. When viewing a sitcom for the first time in class, learners can be challenged to develop their listening skills with the aid of the images they see. This is a great opportunity to expose learners to the target culture and to help them realise they may not understand 100% of what they watch and listen but what they do understand in combination with the images they see is enough to bridge the gaps. Authentic listening material exposes students to language that is closer to what they will experience out of the classroom, and it teaches learners to realise and accept that they will not recognise and understand every word that they hear (Field, 2000)
Tasks based on this approach basically deal with the characters that show up in the episode, the setting, the main action/conflict in which the characters are involved and the resolution/ending. They aim at practising listening for gist and inferring meaning making the most of visual clues.
The whole episode approach can be followed by a selective approach featuring only some scenes of the episode with the purpose of generating a theme-based discussion, practising listening for detail strategies, raising cultural awareness or illustrating/introducing/practising a grammar point or vocabulary items. When the amount of new language which is used in a sitcom is broken down and presented scene by scene, learners can feel more at ease with the new input and enjoy interacting with it.
Some practical techniques for promoting active viewing include: pre viewing activities, vision on/sound off; vision off/sound on; vision on/sound on; freeze-framing, anticipating/predicting; inferring meaning through exploitation of visual clues.
Designing tasks
The level of tasks
When choosing to deal with sitcoms in the classroom, it is vital to promote tasks which help students to succeed and leave the class with a sense of achievement and joy.
Stempleski & Tomalin (1990:11) pointed out that:
“above all, lessons with video should be enjoyable and should provide even weaker students with a genuine sense of achievement: when, for instance, they have grasped the meaning of a quite difficult dialogue because they could follow the action and behaviour which accompanied it; or when they have succeeded in predicting the outcome of a story on the basis of a few visual clues; or when they can use new language effectively, having seen it used in a clearly meaningful context on video”
The tasks designed for this type of material will be adjusted to our students’ level of English. Above anything else, it is important for the teacher to grade the tasks, not the material. Before embarking on the design of the tasks the teacher needs to establish how the material supports the needs of the learners, how it will be integrated into the classroom, and how the content will be exploited to develop language skills (Kerridge, 1986).
The dimensions of tasks
Sitcoms lend themselves well to being exploited from three perspectives: the cognitive, the sociolinguistic and the linguistic. Thus, a wide range of tasks can be planned and put into practice to develop:
- cognitive processing strategies (predicting, bridging information, listening for gist and detail, summarizing)
- pragmatic/sociolinguistic competence (raising awareness of the situational and socio-cultural context)
- linguistic competence. (focusing on the linguistic features which prevail in the text or which are necessary to accomplish the tasks)
As regards the nature of tasks, we are advocates of the complementary roles of meaning focused or communicative tasks and form focused or enabling tasks. According to Estaire & Zanon, (1994:13-20) a communicative task is “a piece of classroom work which, as far as possible, resembles activities which our students or other people carry out in everyday life, thus reproducing processes of everyday communication.” Nunan, (1989:10) defines a communication task as “a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right.” Communicative tasks, in which students interact in situations where the meanings are unpredictable, may include: role-play, discussion, problem-solving.
Form focused or “enabling tasks”, on the other hand, “act as a support for communication tasks. Their purpose is to provide students with the necessary linguistic tools to carry out a communication task.” Estaire and Zanon (1994:15). Enabling tasks, which allow for learners to be actively involved in discovering features of the language (grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure) inductively from the input, may involve discovery and awareness- raising activities.
We can introduce tasks at three stages
- Pre-viewing: before you watch the sitcom/ scene. The idea behind this is to arouse curiosity and make predictions about the content of the sitcom, the characters, the main topics, etc.
- Viewing: while you watch the sitcom/scene. The objective is to confirm predictions and practise different listening strategies while watching. At this stage, you may also extract and introduce the items you would like to exploit and consolidate later in class. Sitcoms present students with a great amount of real language in use. It is the task of the teacher to point out and practise existing language and to choose which new language items they would like their learners to focus on.
- Follow-up: after you watch the sitcom/scene. At this stage you may want to introduce discussion topic areas, do some writing e.g. a review, and consolidate language.
Ideas for each stage
Pre-viewing
- Elicitation of what students know: about (i) the sitcom, (ii) its characters, (iii) its characters’ personalities and problems, (iv) its characters’ relationships, etc.
- Sound off: if learners are not acquainted with the sitcom, they can watch a little bit of the episode and predict what it will be about.
- Back to TV: students turn their backs to the TV set and just listen to key lines in the episode. They then predict what will happen.
- Pictures and information about episode: students predict what will happen based on given information like the title of the episode or pictures from the scenes.
- Discussion: students discuss a topic which is connected with the episode.
- Language practice: students focus on language which will appear in the episode.
- Pre-task work: students go over the worksheet they will use in connection with the episode.
Viewing
Watch the scene(s) several times and let students get the general ideas first and then the more specific ones. To achieve the latter you may play shorter bits of the episode again and again for students to grasp these more specific pieces of information.
- Questionnaires: students watch and listen to answer questions about general and/or specific information in the scenes.
- True or False: give students sentences related to the sitcom. They watch the scenes and decide whether the content in the sentences is true or false.
- Gap-fill: give students paragraphs/sentences taken from the scenes with certain bits blanked out. Students watch and listen carefully to fill in the missing information.
- Matching: break sentences taken from the scenes into two halves and ask students to watch and listen carefully to match the beginnings with the correct endings.
- Multiple choice: students get sentences connected with the scenes with certain bits of information blanked out. Provide them with words/phrases to fill in the blanks correctly based on what they watch and listen.
Follow-up
- Discussing and/or interpreting what students have watched or one of the character’s behaviour, etc.
- Studying new language: consolidation and practice (guided and freer tasks)
- Writing a review about the episode.
- Writing a description of one of the characters.
- Writing a letter from one of the character’s point of view.
- Role-playing a/the scene.
- Predicting what will happen next in the episodes.
- Working on a project based on cross-cultural comparisons.
Video adds fun and motivation to language learning by “grabbing [the students’] attention in a way that is impossible for a static text or a sound-only recording to do” (Walker 1997:1).
Sitcoms, in particular, expose students to contexts of real language use. The language students interact with has not been graded to suit the students’ level of learning. It is the task of the teacher to carefully plan what to do in connection with the sitcom with their learners in mind. “Don’t worry too much about what student level the material is suitable for – but do make sure your task is set for the right level” (Scrivener 1994: 149) Sitcoms have the advantage of being 30 minutes in length making it simpler for the teacher and learners to fulfill their objective over a realistic period of time. Sitcoms are also an obvious way to bring real world into the classroom. They can be used not just as a one-off "fun" activity but as an integrated part of a series of teaching activities, with for example preview / prediction work done before viewing, with the actual viewing being fully exploited for language and skills work and then a follow-up which for example could develop a further skill like writing or speaking.
The amount of action and simple plot lines make sitcoms a rich source not only of language input which is highly contextualised and authentic but also of information about the target culture. The use of video exposes students to material which differs from the traditionally used audio and print-based media as the visual element can be presented along with the linguistic features, therefore adding a further dimension (Willis, 1998).
All in all, sitcoms are user-friendly due to their brevity and simplicity and they are fun. They expose students to authentic language and give them the chance to notice language and acquire it. The key to profiting from sitcoms in the classroom is to conscientiously create materials which are suitable for our students and enriching for their learning experience.
Estaire, S. & J.Zanon. (1994). Planning CLasswork: A Task-Based Approach. Oxford:Macmillan Heinemann.
Field, J. (2000). Modern English Teacher, Online Journal
www.onlinemet.com
Kerridge, D. (1986). The Use of Video Films, Heinemann.
Lewis, M. (1996) ‘Implications of a lexical view of language.’ Willis, J. and Willis D.
(ed.s) Challenge and Change in Language Teaching. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers
Limited.
Nuttall, C. (1996) Teaching Reading Skills in a foreign language (New Edition) Oxford,
Heinemann.
Nunan, D. (1989/2000). Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Beijing: People Education Press, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scrivener, J. (1994) Learning Teaching, Heinemann.
Stempleski, S. & Tomalin, B. (1990). Video in Action: Recipes for Using Video in Language Teaching, Prentice Hall.
Walker, S. (1997). Video for young learners, Online Journal
http://skyscraper.fortunecity.com/networking/68/edtech/aisha2.html
Willis, J. (1998). 101 Ways to Use Video, in Miro, A.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the ICT - Using Technology in the Classroom – Level 1 course at Pilgrims website.
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