Towards integrating television materials into english teaching and learning at the National University of Rwanda: an exploratory case study of the second year english course

4.5. Analysis of the data

4.5.1. Students' views.

This section examines students' views on their listening abilities and their perceptions of the use of TV in English teaching and learning at the NUR. Before dealing with this in detail, I look briefly at some preliminary issues that emerged from the students' questionnaire. These are subdivided into four aspects:

1) background and experience in watching TV

2) students' preferable TV stations/channels

3) their favourite TV programmes

4) languages broadcast on TV.

Firstly, the data indicates that students attach a certain importance to watching TV 19/30, that is 63.3% spend two to three hours a day).Secondly, the students pointed out a number of TV stations and channels they like to watch and as the data indicates TVR, CNN, BBC and Channel O stations attracted most of their attention (see 4.1.1.) Since TV stations broadcasting in English are the focal point in this study, all four above-mentioned stations have English as the medium of communication. TVR, the national Rwanda TV station airs programmes in English, French and Kinyarwanda. When one looks at how much time students spend watching English TV stations (see 4.1.1.), one can assume that generally speaking they gain some knowledge from these stations.

Thirdly, the data indicates that news is the most favoured TV programme of my informants. The students believed that news reflects reality as it occurs and presents events and ideas of interest. As I pointed out in Section 4.1.1, other preferred programmes deal respectively with music, sports and documentaries.

Fourthly, as the data shows, English ranks first 28/30, that is 93.3 %. It is the medium of instruction and a school subject for Second Year English students. Other languages were also listed in this study: French and Kinyarwanda. Apart from their mother tongue and first language Kinyarwanda, they also speak and use French as their additional language.

The next section explores findings in connection with the students' listening abilities in watching TV programmes in English.

4.5.2. Students' listening abilities in watching TV programmes in English.

In asking Question 7 (i.e. how well do you follow TV programmes in English?) I aimed at assessing the current listening abilities of my subjects so that I could have some idea of what needs to be done in terms of improving their level of listening comprehension. In other words, lecturers can use this information to find out which sections they need to concentrate on.

Students' responses to the questionnaire show that more than half (i.e. 16/30 that is 53.3 %) are not able to get both main ideas and details from listening materials on TV. Failure to get the required information may be due to several factors. The students provided two main reasons: the first one is unfamiliarity with various English accents namely American English accent and the second, which relates to the first one, is lack of exposure to native speakers' intonation. This section also examines other underlying factors linked to incomprehension and looks at some strategies students make use of in their listening process.

a) Unfamiliarity with various English varieties.

Concerning the first reason, when they are required to watch different TV programmes of American English background, they are most likely to face listening comprehension difficulties. Here, my subjects (i.e. EFL/ESL learners) indicated that they had problems with what American English speakers say mainly because of unfamiliarity with English intonation of that accent. For example, this student expresses his problem as follows:

Frequently, I get main ideas only because American speakers' intonation^7(*) is difficult to follow and they speak quickly and it is not easy to get the whole message.

In relation to the problems second year English students face with `English intonation' Roach (2000:153) proposes a plausible solution in the following words:

The only efficient way to learn to use the intonation of a language is the way a child acquires the intonation of its first language, and the training referred to above should help the adult learner of English to acquire English intonation in a similar (though much slower) way-through listening and to talking to English speakers.

While discussing the question of variety of accents, particularly those causing difficulties for listeners, it is worth associating this debate with the students' views on Question 8 where I wanted to know which English accents my informants found more difficult than others. On this question the students ranked the different accents in order of difficulty. As you can see from their responses, the American variety of English is the most difficult (22/30, that is 73.3 %). Why is this accent one of the causes of listening difficulties for the second year English students? Unfamiliarity with the accent is one reason as mentioned earlier. Outside the classroom setting, the only languages they can listen to are either Kinyarwanda and French or any other indigenous language used in Rwanda.

English lecturers at the NUR whom students often listen to are either Rwandans or expatriates from neighbouring countries such as Burundi, Congo, Uganda and Tanzania. They are qualified in the English language but they are not first language speakers of it. The disadvantage is that students are used to their lecturers' accent as the sole provider of input which does not help them much.

In the case of the NUR, students need immersion into the English environment (i.e. living or travelling in the country where English is a first language) but the university's financial constraints would not allow this to happen. Until long-term solutions are found, the alternative one is to make use of TV. Here, lecturers should not expect miracles from this medium. Instead the success of TV in language classes depends on sound planning and a judicious exploitation of TV materials in a bid to achieve the lesson's objectives.

b) Lack of exposure to native speakers' intonation.

With regard to difficulties related to the American English accent pointed out in this study, particular aspects of English speech constitute the source of recurrent listening problems. As discussed in Section 4.5.2.a `intonation' constitutes a major obstacle to the students. As an illustration, the respondents do not find occasion to listen to native speakers in real life as they raise and lower their voices to express different meanings. Hence, authentic TV materials or video recordings offer opportunities to discriminate between a range of these features. TV programmes will be more practical in a class where the lecturer is not a native speaker of English and it will serve as a model of presentation.

TV can also be useful where the sound systems of British and American English are a major query for the viewer. Television presentation of such difficulties can assist the learner to have exposure to the intonation patterns referred to earlier. To illustrate this, when the students are trained to listen carefully to voice movement (i.e. tone) they can later know how certain utterances are used to express several language functions. These can be to signal whether to agree, disagree, question or hesitate, or indicate completion and continuation in turn-taking etc.

TV materials can serve as a model that offers accurate and quick explanation of specific language phenomena such as discriminating between varieties of American and English sound systems. Here, we can have production of some vowel sounds, or differences in vowel length, or consonantal differences, etc. This is another aspect where the language learner is once again called upon to apply the bottom-up approach to language learning (see 2.5.2.2.). He is required to decode, recognise and differentiate different sound patterns of English.

In brief, one solution to communication breakdown students normally face is use of authentic sources from the native speech community that helps to engage English students in authentic cultural experiences. Such sources can include TV programmes whose content should be selected with reference to the language features students need.

c) Other underlying factors to listening incomprehension.

It is obvious that success or failure in listening also depends on listening circumstances and purposes. If the students listen for entertainment purposes or academic ones, the results are going to be different. This is why for instance, in a listening class, motivation plays an important role. If the listening material and activities based upon it are stressful and if they are not relevant to their immediate needs or decontextualised (e.g. if the students do not know what the material will be about or what they will be expected to do, etc) the anxiety will increase and the quality of the intake will not improve (Kilfoil and Van der Walt 1997:146)

Besides, in relation to Question 9 where 22/30 (i.e.73%) of my informants asserted they have never been exposed to TV watching in the language class, this could be another factor behind their incomprehension. An additional cause could be that they might have not been trained to take a top-down approach to listening where the listeners/viewers are advised to infer from what they hear, to make use of their schemata (i.e. their background knowledge). This allows them to arrive at a sound interpretation of what they are listening to, rather than attempt to process every word.

Under this perspective, developing effective listening that overcomes the learners' difficulties as raised by my informants (i.e. Question 7), also requires promoting `holistic viewing'. This refers to the classroom situation where learners are given the opportunity to watch a video or TV extract in its entirety while undertaking a viewing task. This task could lead to a more successful listening activity. Now how can this task be designed? One way to do so is by using Wh- questions such as Who? What? Where? This can lead them to establish the context, the setting, the participants and understanding the global message (Miro, 1998:5-6).

In addition to this, in real-life situations, listening comprehension is aided by paralinguistic clues, as is the case when you deal with TV listening material. The circumstances surrounding the speaker provide hints to the meaning of the talk or speech. For instance, watching body language can assist language learners to improve their listening comprehension. In this case, some of the meaning comes from the speaker's facial expressions and body movements.

d) Listening strategies: hints or clues for better listening.

Despite listening problems the second year students encounter, they manage at least to experience easier listening situations when they are coping with some TV programmes. This is what they affirmed in response to Question 7. My respondents specified that it was easier to get more information (e.g. detailed elements of the information) while they were watching the news, for instance. My subjects mentioned some hints that help them to get the required information without much effort. Among these clues are news headlines/titles that provide more information on what is being said. These are known in specialised terms as `graphics' For instance, the latter can show the location where an event is being broadcast live or give a summary of the news content.

In general, the viewers have recourse to the textual organisation of the TV news that is predictable and whose modalities of information delivery assist in grasping the content of the news story. Nonetheless, in some cases, though the graphics may help the learners in the listening process, sometimes they do not appear on the screen long enough to be understood by the students, or the language patterns on the screen may be too brief to be fully comprehended.

It is worth pointing out that watching TV news and getting the required or intended information is not always predictable for the EFL/ESL student. There are factors underlying the easier access to the news content and some have been touched upon earlier. The main ones are background knowledge or content schemata required by viewers to fully understand a news item; formal schemata or viewer familiarity with the discourse structure and genre of TV news in general and in particular cultural contexts; and the linguistic difficulties of processing combinations of visual and auditory messages (Bell, 2003:1). Meanwhile, second year English students talked about other English accents that are likely to cause trouble in listening (e.g. Indian accent) but the reasons behind this problem already identified with regard to the American accent, apply as well to other varieties of English.

In the following section, I examine the respondents' attitudes towards TV in English teaching and learning. As most responses from students overlap with the lecturers' in a number of aspects, I decided to combine their views. In fact, the sub themes verify the expression of the learners' needs and the lecturers' responsibilities in satisfying their students' expectations.

* ⁷ According to Peter Roach (2000:2), intonation refers to the use of pitch of the voice to convey meaning. As mentioned earlier, the pitch is the degree to which a sound is high or low.