2.2 Educational television
According to Fourie (2001:482), Educational Television or ETV
in shortened form, is defined as the use of television as a medium for
communication and development purposes. ETV has also been called Educational
and Television Films, the latter considered as a collection of films that range
from some of the most important historical events of the world. ETV has been a
regular feature in diverse educational environments. On this note, Casey
(2002: 76) states that educational television covers a wide a range of
programming, from preschool-age children's programmes to broadcast material
designed for schools, colleges and universities to documentaries and lifestyle
programming.
Fourie (2001: 484) elaborates on theories and approaches
pertaining to mediated teaching and learning and he refers to the well-known
behaviourist theory with stimuli-response hypothesis. He argues that ETV
programmes must be carefully planned and evaluated in order to function as
clear and effective inputs or stimuli. The underlying principle is that the
learners' cognitive processes must be stimulated through activities that
promote participation and practice. In the field of language teaching through
television there are a number of goals advocated in ETV and are stated with the
purpose of developing the learner's knowledge as a whole. Among other goals,
one can list: acquiring and developing basic skills such as to acquire
information and interpret meaning through observation, listening and reading;
to express information and share meaning with others through speaking, writing
and nonverbal communication.
In addition, there is a set of principles governing the ETV
learning process. Any learning situation that involves ETV (whether in a
traditional classroom or any other formal or non-formal learning situation)
involves four basic interactions: between learner and teacher, between learner
and learner, between learner and ETV, between teacher and ETV (Fourie,
2001:496)
In the final analysis, according to Romiszowski (1988:206),
educational television should not be confused with instructional television.
The first has programmes that do not have specific pre-determined instructional
objectives, but have educational value either as a source of information on
current events (newsreel), opposing points of view (debates), interesting or
famous persons (interviews) and so on. Regarding the second kind of television,
the writer highlights the fact that it is possible to build educational
programmes into an instructional system, as one form of stimulus component, but
the teacher must devise appropriate practice tasks, in which the learners apply
what they saw on television to tasks that lead to the achievement of specific
worthwhile instructional objectives.
The next section tackles approaches to language teaching and
learning taking into account their evolution in history up to the present.
Since this study is focusing on EFL/ESL, it is necessary to examine the role of
various approaches used in language teaching and the position they allocate to
the use of audiovisual materials in language teaching.
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