Teaching Methods of English

Learning is the capacity a person needs every day to respond in an appropriate way to different requests and challenges. According to Richard Mayer, a professor of Psychology at the University of California, information is processed through two channels, the verbal and the visual. In the learning process, the teacher lead his explanation through words and pictures, students learn more successfully. If we focus on the teacher-student verbalization system, using only words, students will have greater difficulty remembering what a professor said shortly after the information has been transmitted. TV Series with subtitles have become an effective method of learning where one can even learn two subjects at the same time. Other Teaching Methods prove to be effective with learning the English Language as well.

TV Series show different situations of different contexts. For instance, a person can watch a show about friends or vampires. People can choose what genre they prefer like comedy or science fiction. This way, they are doing what they like. When a person are learning another language, one can use the subtitles that will improve your learning. While one listening to the person talk, they can see the word that the person said. Therefore, their mind will associate the sound to word. This way, using the two channels will process the information. In addition, they can annotate unknown words to look after the translation.

For instance, Breaking Bad is a TV Series that involves Chemistry. It is very interesting because it has many scenes explaining concepts about Chemistry. This catches the viewer’s attention in the series, especially if the viewer likes science. The history of series is engaging. The scenes has events that happen in real life like devaluing a great profession such as a professor, and gaining much profit from illegal things like drug trafficking. In addition, Breaking Bad also happens in family context so it has an English not so hard to understand.

 On the another hand, some people can claim that watching series is not a good way to learn another language because they do not learn the grammar of language. They can say that the viewers just learn many slangs words of context of the series. The learning process can be used in many ways to learn. Immersing in a new culture, learning a new language is important to know in everyday dialect and slang words to better communicate with the people daily.

Traditional methods of learning do not hold the attention of students. In the process of learning using only books no longer works. Actually, most of students do not like to read books. Reading is a good way of learning but is boring. There are days that one do not pay attention to what they are doing. Therefore, in learning process they need of many things that catch their attention. When watching a series, they involve theirself with the history and want to watch more.

TV series are an effective method of learning but should not be the only technique used to learn. The learning process is long and diverse. Many ways of study can be chosen. Increasingly the teaching methods are adapting to the age that we live in. Therefore, we need to look at what methods catch more attention. The traditional method is needed to improve the writing. However, to watch a TV series is an innovative and cool way to learn English.  

Taynara Matos