Listening to Culture:

Teaching With Television in the EFL Classroom

By Davey Young
daveyyoung@gmail.com

Using Television Shows for Teaching

Screening a television series in its entirety in the EFL classroom can have several advantages for
learners, most notably listening comprehension (Danan, 2004). Additionally, viewing video in
the target language with closed captioning improves reading speed and language comprehension
skills through visualization (Stewart & Pertusa, 2004). By watching a television series, students
can improve their vocabulary as well as develop listening and speed reading-skills in the same
way they would while watching an English language movie with subtitles, but a television series
has added benefits that films can’t offer. All of these benefits come from the fact that a television
series provides prolonged exposure to uniform content and characters at a relatively static level
of comprehensibility.

Furthermore, a television series offers a cultural framework—and the timeframe needed to

observe it—that movies often can’t deliver. By watching several episodes of a single series,
students are able to witness plots and characters develop. Plots are often formulaic; if students
learn the formula they can more easily follow an episode’s story without comprehending all the
language used. With hours and hours of screen time, characters can develop a great deal
(capturing interest) while providing a uniform pattern of discourse (bolstering listening skills).

Choosing a Show

An important consideration to make before deciding to use a television series in an EFL

classroom, as well before deciding which series to use, pertains to vocabulary. Instructors should
be confident that students have a large enough vocabulary to follow the general plot, and
likewise that the chosen series is at an appropriate lexical level (Webb & Rodgers, 2009.)
Comedies and genre shows must be considered carefully in relation to students’ levels and
cultural contexts.

Screening a television series is also an opportunity to provide useful cultural information, and so
shows that lack authentic cultural value should not be used. Once a series appropriate for the
students’ level has been chosen, the instructor must be sure that it will engage and interest the
students:

• Does the subject matter allow for meaningful and interesting activities?
• Will student interest be maintained throughout the series?
• Will it bore or offend any of the students?

The ideal series must strike a balance between its instructional uses, cultural validity, and
interest to the students. Shows that include relatable or universal themes are an easy way to
capture student interest while insuring cultural validity. The length of the course must also
accommodate the length of the series so that the entire show or season matches the timeframe
of the course. The length of each episode should also fit easily into a class period while still
allowing time for pre- and postviewing activities.

Teaching With Television 1 TESOL Connections: September 2011

Though by no means a comprehensive list, some suggestions that fit these criteria are:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer

• Firefly
• Varsity Blues
• Heroes
• Glee
• Ten Things I Hate about You
• Modern Family

These suggestions range in their nature of content, which should be carefully considered before
you commit to using one in the classroom. Some of these suggested series may be deemed
inappropriate for certain groups. Thus, instructors are recommended to familiarize themselves
with the series before using it as an instructional tool. Above all else, the selected series should
have several access points through the narrative, characters, or setting, through which the
students can relate to and make sense of the material.

Planning Classroom Activities

Activities can be categorized into three groups by the skills they exercise. They are listening
(both discrete and general), production (speaking or writing), and negotiation of meaning
(including cultural comparisons and examinations). Obviously, these categories are not
mutually exclusive, though most activities emphasize one. Students can be best served—and
your aims best met—by intertwining skills practice with the cultural information embedded in
the source material. In this way students can “listen to culture.”

Each episode should have at least one activity tied in with it. These can occur either before,
during, or after viewing the episode, depending on the nature of the activity and instructional
aims. Each episode may lend itself to specific activities such as:

• predicting and speculating

• summarizing a scene or episode
• role-playing a scene as characters from the show
• subtitling a muted scene
• writing an advice column for characters who find themselves in tough situations

Such activities can utilize transcripts, trailers, or screen-grabs from a series. More traditional
listening comprehension strategies employing simple worksheets may also be used. Such
activities can be used to prepare students to receive the content of the episode as well as
facilitate discussion. They are especially useful early in the course when the instructor must be
sure that the chosen series is comprehensible, interesting, and appropriate. More long-term
assignments, such as episode viewing journals, are also an effective way to ensure student
participation and support comprehension.

Instructional Model: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

When I began teaching two EFL classes to University freshmen in China, I had both practical
and methodological concerns. My students spent 12 hours a week in an English classroom, and I
was extremely concerned that they wouldn’t stay motivated, interested, or focused. In addition,
my primary goal as a foreign teacher of an EFL class in China was to improve my students’ oral

Teaching With Television 2 TESOL Connections: September 2011

and aural skills. To that end, I decided to screen a 45-minute episode of an American television
show at the end of each week and to design listening and discussion activities around each
episode. After a bit of thought, I easily settled on the first season of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the
Vampire Slayer.

Aside from use in the language classroom, the cultural and academic merits of Buffy are
uncontested (Horrick, 2011). So called “Buffy Studies” are a phenomenon that came into being
very soon after the show debuted, and work in the field is still being actively pursued. An online
journal, Slayage, publishes quarterly issues, holds conferences, and gives an annual award for
excellence in Buffy scholarship. Several universities offer courses on the show, which affords a
vehicle for studies in gender, popular culture, media, and even aesthetics (Wilcox, 2006).

While my aims with my EFL class were not so ambitious, I was confident that such rich material
would present plenty of opportunities for actively engaging my students with the material in
order to supplement their language skills while increasing their interest in both English
language and American culture. As an American teaching an EFL course titled “English
Language & Culture,” this seemed like an appropriate choice as it allowed me to affirm students’
cultural observations and offer dialect specific instruction via the chosen series.

When season 1 begins, Buffy Summers is starting out at a new school in Sunnydale, California.
We quickly discover that Buffy is more than meets the eye: she is “the Chosen One,” selected by
some divine and mystical process to slay vampires and, time and again, save the world from
apocalypse (Whedon, 1997). While the story is certainly fantastical, it carries a number of
universal thematic underpinnings that allow cross-cultural access points for Chinese students:
the alienated outsider, the new kid at school, the fight to fit in and find friends, the need to make
the grade, and the struggle to balance school life with outside pressures are all present. Framing
these more pedestrian themes is the universally relatable story: the battle between good and evil.

Other characters in the series seem to conform to easily discernible tropes. We have the
computer nerd, the class clown, and the popular girl. Throughout the course of the first season
we see these characters negotiate the typical dramas of high school life, peppered with scrapes
and tangles with vampires, demons, and invisible girls. The fantastic stories provide a fun
reprieve from class as usual (for students both on screen and off), while the more realistic story
lines, settings, and characters anchor the story in a cultural context which is surprisingly
authentic.

For the first episode, small exercises before, during, and after viewing ensured that students
could comprehend the necessary plot and character points. This was imperative for avoiding
later problems with comprehension and preparing students to receive and contextualize the
current episode (Davis). Before viewing the episode, students wrote individual poll questions
from the prompt “the first day of school.” Once students had a properly written question, they
circulated the room to gather results.

Afterwards, students were placed in groups of four to five to share their answers. During viewing,
students completed an exercise composed of discrete comprehension questions and matching
character names to a written description. After viewing, the groups met again to discuss how
their experiences on the first day of school compared to those seen in the episode. This
discussion was directed towards considering cultural differences between both the school
environment and how students fit into it. A list of subtopics was given to the students to guide
the discussion in this direction:

Teaching With Television 3 TESOL Connections: September 2011

 In China In America
What students wear
How classes are organized
What students do for fun
After-school activities
The school building
Relationships between
students
Relationships between
students and teachers
Dating

Not all of these comparisons can be made from viewing the first episode only, and so students
kept a running list of such comparisons in the form of a viewing journal. By checking students’
journals every couple of episodes, I was able to track participation and comprehension as well as
engage my students in meaningful conversation.

With specific regard to using Buffy as a teaching tool in a Chinese university classroom, the
series affords a substantial number of cultural aspects that such students find quite different
from their own. The universality of the themes and straight-forward presentation make these
aspects readily accessible and leave room for meaningful discussion. Full transcripts and
synopses of each episode, along with trailers and screen captures, are available online at the
website “Buffy World” (Russel, Connolly, Bischel, & Vaughn, n.d.).

By the end of my courses, students had viewed the entire first season and responded well to its
use in the classroom. For final group presentations, students performed a “lost episode” for the
class. These lasted 8–10 minutes and were scored using a rubric. Verbal responses to the
assignment were very positive, and a significant portion of the class stated they would continue
with the series. In light of this, I found that Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and certainly a number
of other television series—can provide long-term instructional opportunities and motivate
students to learn the language and culture in tandem.

References

Danan, M. (2004). Captioning and subtitling: Undervalued language learning strategies.

Audiovisual Translation, 49(1), 67–77. Retrieved from
http://www.erudit.org/revue/Meta/2004/v49/n1/009021ar.html?lang=en

Davis, R.S. (1998). Captioned video: Making it work for you. The Internet TESL Journal, IV(3).
Retrieved from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Davis-CaptionedVideo/

Horrick, A. (2011). Whedonology: An academic Whedon studies bibliography. Retrieved from

http://www.alysa316.com/Whedonology/

Russell, H., Connolly, M., Bischel, G., & Vaughn, T. (n.d.) Buffy world. Retrieved from
http://www.buffyworld.com/

Stewart, M. A., & Pertusa, I. (2004). Gains to language learners from viewing target language
closed-captioned films. Foreign Language Annals, 37(3), 438–42.

Teaching With Television 4 TESOL Connections: September 2011

Webb, S., & Rodgers, P.H. (2009). Vocabulary demands of television programs. Language
Learning, 59(2), 335–66.

Whedon, J. (Producer). (1997). Buffy the vampire slayer [Television series]. Los Angeles:
Mutant Enemy Productions.

Wilcox, R. (2006). In “the demon section of the card catalog”: Buffy studies and television
studies. Slayage. 6(1). Retrieved from
http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage21/Wilcox.htm

____________________________________

Davey Young received his BA in English from the University of Puget Sound and his MA in
TESOL from Seattle Pacific University. He lives and teaches at the university level between
Seattle and Jinan, Shandong, China. A major area of interest for Davey is the role that culture
plays in language learning

Teaching With Television 5 TESOL Connections: September 2011