Passive learning. The impact of TV shows on students’ learning behaviours and performance

Abstract

There is substantial evidence that watching TV in English, especially free voluntary viewing, makes a major contribution to improving listening skills and consequently, has an impact on the productive or active skills of speaking and writing. Often in the process of learning a new language, students begin with receptive understanding of the new items and then later move on to productive use. In the classroom, receptive skills support the productive ones. After a listening activity for example, it may contribute to better speaking and pronunciation outcomes when target words and expressions have been highlighted. Outside the classroom, when a certain level of proficiency is reached, it is generally recognised that many people are using television shows as both form of entertainment and a way to help them learn English. In this paper there are different steps, through data collection, to be taken into account in order to attain how recent studies have investigated to what extent students make progress when they consider what is more or less effective when doing independent study. That is, incidental learning considered, by means of watching English speaking TV shows in their free time. Basically, the questions that may arise would be: What kind of TV programmes help them learn English? When do we have to choose between L1 or L2 closed captioned videos? At what stage should teachers and students use subtitles or omit them? To make definite statements on those questions, first, we find foundations in the educational psychology and multimedia learning. Second, there is the revision of concepts like incidental or passive acquisition, understood as unintentional, towards independent learning. Finally, it is relevant to have a look at the breakdown of different studies that conclude what is recommended when it comes to using subtitles at different phases in the acquisition of English as a second language.