III. Analytical-synthesized search

Task 1. Look at these different types of programmes.

A. Think of an example of each type of programme from TV in your own country. Which ones do you enjoy watching? Why?

A soap opera; “reality” TV programme; investigative documentary;

travel programme; panel discussion; sitcom;

talk show; current affairs programme; news bulletin;

chat show; educational programme; interview;

quiz programme; magazine programme; nature life programme;

a documentary about the developing world; game show.

B. How would you describe TV programming in your country? Use some of the words below.

Shallow; serious; trivial; biased;

mindless; cultural; informative; educational:

broad-minded; obsessed with celebrity; chewing gum for the eyes.

Task 2. What is the purpose of our television? Ponder over this problem. Fill In the semantic scheme. Do you think TV should entertain or inform?

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Task 3. Read the information about TV channels in GB.

A. Tell us about all the channels that every citizen in Britain has a possibility to receive. Use the following table.

B. Tell us about all the channels that every citizen of our country has a possibility to receive. Use this table as a model to carry out your own survey.

These are the channels which all viewers in Britain receive.

	BBC 1	ITV	BBC 2	Channel 4
	Started 1936	Started 1954	Started 1964	Started 1982
	No advertising	Advertisements every 15-30 minutes	No advertising	Advertisements every 15-30 minutes
Early weekday mornings	A rather relaxed style of news magazine punctuated with more formal news summaries	Open University programmes	A very informal breakfast show
Mornings and early afternoons	A mixture of popular discussion programmes, quiz shows, soap operas and an even more relaxed type of magazine programme, usually presented by a male-female pair of presenters	Educational programmes, some aimed at schools and others with a more general educational purpose
Late afternoons	Children's programmes, which vary greatly in style and content	General documentary and features.
Evenings	News (including regional news programmes) and the most popular soaps, dramas, comedies, films and various programmes of light entertainment and general interest	Documentaries, and programmes appealing to minority groups, and to minority interests; drama and “alternative” comedy; news programmes which cover matters in more depth than those on BBC 1 or ITV
			Open University (late at night)
Weekends	Much of weekend afternoons are devoted to sport. Saturday evenings include the most popular live variety shows.
	Channel 5	Started in 1997. It is a commercial channel (it gets its money from advertising) which is received by about two-thirds of British households. Its emphasis is on entertainment (for example, it screens a film every night at peak viewing time). However, it makes all other types of programme too. Of particular note is its unconventional presentation of the news, which is designed to appeal to younger adults.
	There is also a Welsh language channel for viewers in Wales.

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Task 4. Read the interview “TV's disastrous impact on children” with Neil Postman, Professor of Communication, Arts and Sciences, New York.

A. Make up a list of unknown words which you may use in your speech.

B. While reading the text decide the author`s opinion in influence of TV on children.

CHILDREN AND TELEVISION

Watching television over a long span seriously damages children's ability to think clearly, says a media expert. He maintains, too, that exposure to TV sensationalism robs youngsters of childhood.

Q. Professor Postman, is television a good or bad influence on the way children learn?

A. It's turning out to be a disastrous influence, at least as far as we can determine at present. Television appears to be shortening the attention span of the young as well as eroding, to a considerable extent, their linguistic powers and their ability to handle mathematical symbolism. Even more serious, in my view, is that television is opening up all of society's secrets and taboos, thus erasing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood.

Q. Is television more pervasive in a child's world than school?

A. Absolutely. I call television the "first curriculum" because of the amount of attention our children give to it. By now, the basic facts are known by almost everyone: between the ages of 6 and 18, the average child spends roughly 15,000 to 16,000 hours in front of a television set, whereas school probably consumes no more than 13,000 hours.

Moreover, it is becoming obvious that there really is no such thing as "children's" programming. Between midnight and 2 in the morning there are something like 750,000 children throughout America watching television every day. There's a fantasy people have that after 10 p.m. children aren't watching television; that's nonsense.

Many parents, as well as educators, also have the mistaken belief that television is an "entertainment medium" in which little of enduring value is either taught by or learned from it. Television has a transforming power at least equal to that of the printing press and possibly as great as that of the alphabet itself.

Q. How does TV hurt a child's linguistic ability?

A. Television is essentially a visual medium. It shows pictures moving very rapidly and in a very dynamic order. Although human speech is heard on television, it is the picture that always contains the most important meanings.

Television can never teach what a medium like a book can teach, and yet educators are always trying to pretend that they can use television to promote the cognitive habits and the intellectual discipline that print promotes. In this respect they will always be doomed to failure. Television is not a suitable medium for conveying ideas, because an idea is essentially language - words and sentences.

The code through which television communicates - the visual image - is accessible to everyone. Understanding printed words must be learned; watching pictures does not require any learning.

As a result, TV is a medium that becomes intelligible to children beginning at about the age of 36 months. From this very early age on, television continuously exerts influence.

For the reason, I think it's fair to say that TV, as a curriculum, moulds the intelligence and character of youth far more than formal schooling. Beyond that, evidence is accumulating that TV watching hurts academic performance. A recent California Department of Education survey indicated that the more children sit in front of the television, the worse they do on achievement-test scores.

Q. Are you saying that television doesn't allow a person to accumulate knowledge based on past experiences?

A. That's right. Language tends to be more abstract; it encourages the use of imagination. It is not true, as many insist, that watching TV is a passive experience. Anyone who has observed children watching television will know how foolish that statement is. In watching TV, children have their emotions fully engaged. It is their capacity for abstraction that is quiescent.

I'm not criticizing television for that. I'm saying that's what television does; that is the nature of the medium. Television, after all, does have a valuable capacity to involve people emotionally in its pictures.

Q. How does television affect interaction in the classroom?

A. Schools assume that there are some things you must know before you can learn other things. They assume that not all things are as immediately accessible as they are on television and that it takes hard work and lengthy periods of study to attain many desirable things that are not immediately visible, such as knowledge. The temptation is very great for teachers to substitute for real learning something that's fairly jazzy and that will immediately capture the attention of kids.

I'm not saying that's always bad, but it would be a mistake to allow that strategy to dominate one's thinking about teaching. There are times when you are going to have to say to kids, "You must understand such and such before we can get on to this next point." And if the kid says, "But this is boring," or "How can I use it?" sometimes you have to say, "I know, but that's the way some things are." Television works against this notion.

Q. Should teachers employ audio-visual aids that have a relationship to television to enhance their instruction?

а. Nо. I'm against that for a couple of reasons. The most important is that a high degree of visual stimulation, such as you get with these audio-visual media, tends to distract attention away from language. I recently reviewed some studies on the effects of illustrations in learning-to-read books, and the evidence is that the more illustrations in readers, the less well the students learn the words.

I think this "hidden curriculum" runs through all the new media - television, movies, video-tape and computerized video games. We become more sensitive to visual representations and less to language. In an environment in which nonlinguistic information is moved at the speed of light, in nonlogical patterns, in vast and probably inassimilable quantities, the word and all it stands for loses prestige, power and relevance

C. Say whether the following statements are true or false. Develop the ideas you agree with.

1. Professor Postman assesses that the influence of television on children is disastrous. 2. Television is responsible for the disappearing of the dividing line between childhood and adulthood. 3. Television is more important than school. 4. Children watch mostly morning programmes. 5. Television is primarily an entertainment medium. 6. On television the picture is far more important than the word. 7. Television can hardly teach a child to think and convey ideas the way print does. 8. Television is intelligible to many more people than the book. 9. The more children sit in front of the television, the more they know. 10. Watching TV is a passive experience. 11. Television's valuable capacity is to involve people emotionally in its pictures. 12. Television stimulates learning by making it a pleasure. 13. The word and all it stands for loses prestige, power and relevance in the audio-visual world.

D. What are the advantages and disadvantages of television influence on children? Fill in the following chart. Be ready to discuss the information.

Children and Television
Positive Influence	Negative Influence

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Task 5. Listen to the recording on a cassete. The speakers are talking about TV and films.

A. Listen to the conversation and fill in the chart.

	Bob	John
What is his nationality?
Does he watch TV much? Why?
What does he like to watch on TV?

B. Do you watch TV? How often? What are your preferences?

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Task 6. You will hear part of a radio programme on a disk in which a woman called Helena Smith talks about her life as a weather presenter on TV.

A. Complete the sentences while listening to the recording.

Helena's working day consists of _____ shifts. Her first job is to read _____ from the previous shift. At 11.30am there is a meeting in the weather _____ for everyone. The team decides which maps and _____ to use. Radio, as well as TV, makes use of the _____ which are written. The lights and microphone are worked by pressing a _____. The presenters can hear the _____ through their ear-piece. Helena is frequently asked about the presenters' _____ _____ must not be tight as presenters have to raise their arms. Some viewers complained that Helena wore the same _____ for to long.

B. Would you like to work in television. Give your arguments.

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Task 7. Read an article for a student magazine about the advantages and disadvantages of living without TV.

A. The computer has found ten mistakes (grammar, punctuation, or spelling).Can you correct them?

LIVING WITHOUT TV

Almost every family today have a TV set, in fact probably more than one, and people everywhere spend hours watching it. But a few minutes choose to live without a TV set because they think there are advantages.

The first advantage is that families spend more time talk to each other. Secondly, they spend more time doing more creative things like reading or painting. Thirdly, they spend more time outdoors, and are usually more fit.

On the other hand, there are also disadvantages, example, children who don't have a TV mayfeel differents from there school friends, and often won't know what they are talking about. Also it is not true that all TV programes are bad. There are also good ones, like documentarys, and people who live without a TV may know less about hats happening in the world.

In conclusion, althought living without a TV has some advantages, I think today it's unrealistic and that we should just try to turn the TV out when there's nothing good on.

B. Read the article again. Discuss the following points.

· What are the three advantages of life without a TV set?

· What are the two disadvantages?

· Is the writer for or against having a TV set?

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