English television programs have been incorporated within public-school classrooms in western countries for a long time to capture student interest in various subjects. Many researchers favor English programs as a partner inside of classrooms while others hold negative perceptions of the concept. However, there is little research to provide a…

In line with recent Conversation Analytic work on language learning as situated practice, this article investigates how interactants can create language learning opportunities for themselves and others in and through social interaction. The study shows how the participants of "Big Brother Finland," a reality TV show, whose main…

Parenting is a recurring topic in books, newspapers, magazines and TV shows in Western societies. Often it involves experts giving advice to adults. Hence, parenting is made visible, categorised, evaluated and corrected in public. Judgements on what is desirable are demonstrated, and objectives to be achieved are pointed out. In the present study,…

From its inception in 1922 the BBC pioneered a new medium in the education of children. This article traces the origins and development of a particular broadcast, "Children's Hour Prayers," a short worship time for children (appended to "Children's Hour") which began in wartime, and ended, along with the host programme itself,…

This study focuses on "Independence Day", an episode of "Arab Labor" (first season, 2008), a pioneer bilingual Hebrew-Arabic satirical Israeli TV series, written by Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli author and journalist. "Arab Labor" was a breakthrough in the Israeli popular TV scape, where, as a rule, Arab-Israeli…

The mass media are an essential constituent in the construction of a nation's and an individual's self-image. Whether people like and know it or not, from early childhood on people are surrounded by media images and messages that to a great extent shape their perception and understanding of the world as well as contribute to their identity…

This article offers a joint reading of two cultural texts that reflect the contest over victim-oriented characterizations of queer youth in contemporary culture. The first text is a representation of queer youth taken from the popular UK television series "Shameless" (2004). The second text is an online discussion about representations…

Empowering children for a critical and judicious use and consumption of media is a main objective of media literacy. This paper aims to examine the range of television programs available for children in Portugal through a comparative analysis of the programming for children broadcast by the four Portuguese terrestrial channels (RTP1, RTP2, SIC and…

"Promoting public understanding" is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the…

In this article, I review the options that teachers and students have to obtain German TV in the U.S.: through satellite and cable networks and by streaming, downloading, or recording TV programs through the internet. I also address how one can access TV programs over the air in the German-speaking countries by using a notebook PC and TV card.

This study analyzes gender variation in nonstandard typography--specifically, abbreviations and insertions--in mobile phone text messages (SMS) posted to a public Italian interactive television (iTV) program. All broadcast SMS were collected for a period of 2 days from the Web archive for the iTV program, and the frequency and distribution of…

Podcasting in higher education is the presentation of study material in digital format that can be downloaded as audio or video files onto a MP3 player or computer. These files can then be accessed anywhere and at any time students choose. The use of podcasting is now widespread amongst undergraduate students, yet their application to the specific…

This qualitative study attempts to determine favorite TV dramas of children from two rural schools and analyze children's discourse about messages and values of TV dramas. As parallel to children's views, teacher perceptions on critical media literacy were investigated in the study. This study aims to explore the content--messages/values--of…

Adult learning is not a tidy business: adults fit learning into the spaces left by the other demands on complex lives, and into the spaces left in administrative structures overwhelmingly designed for other people. No simple metric can capture adults' diverse purposes and achievements, and no single programme can capture the full range of things…

This article focuses on the challenges involved in conducting evaluations of interactive radio programmes in South Africa with large numbers of schools, teachers, and learners. It focuses on the role such large-scale evaluation has played during the South African radio learning programme's development stage, as well as during its subsequent…