Introduction
For many years, parents have relied on using educational programs to teach and engage their children with new concepts and materials. Conversely, many children have also used television as an opportunity for learning and language development. For example, the rise of television programs like Elmo Street and Teletubbies demonstrates this upward trend of substituting media sources for teaching and learning. However, despite the increasing support from parents toward television programs, many researchers have mixed reviews on putting our children into viewing long hours of what they considered unnecessary learning. Thus in what follows of this paper, I will focus on explaining how television programs can support and facilitate word development. Moreover, I will also discuss the mixed literacy support for using television as a learning tool and finally, I will conduct a study that measures, specifically, the relationship between watching educational TV and learning novel words. Hopefully, with these measures, I will be able to find supporting evidence that proves educational TV can be a good predictor for word learning.
Throughout the years, one continuous point of debate has been whether educational TV can facilitate and improve word learning in children. Many studies on this debate have found distinct and mixed research outcomes. For example, one study has been Mabel’s Rice Word from Sesame Street, in which he found mixed supporting evidence that television
Furthermore, children spend more time watching television rather than reading. “A 2007 study published by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reported that the average US household has a television set turned on an average of 8 hours and 11 minutes every single day. Much of that television watching is being done by children” (Preface to 'How Should Television Be Regulated?'). Most children have watched over three school years worth of television. In the article “TV Doesn’t teach,” it is pointed out that the decline in the ability to read in
Television plays a very important role in everyday life. As children grow and develop, they can be influenced by what they see and hear.
Technology throughout the past 30-40 years has become more advanced and accessible than ever. The television specifically has developed extremely since its beginning. What started off as a single camera caption, has developed into a full fledge worldwide availability. Within the United States, the TV is a normal everyday object common in households, hotels, schools, and even restaurants. There are approximately 118.4 million household in the United States that own a television set ( The Number of TV Households in the United States from season 2000-2001 to season 2016-2017 (in millions)).However, the increased amount of time spent watching TV has had a tremendous impact on people, especially kids. The differences in generations throughout the development of the TV has led to many questions, all revolving around whether or not the televisions has had a good or negative impact pertaining to children. Time spent watching television affects the brain, ability to learn, and skill levels in different areas (source. In the book “Last Child in The Woods,” Richard Louv discusses how children in the 1940’s would watch out the window at the scenery and have conversations, while children now sit and watch a movie on a flip-down video screen without knowledge to the outside world (Louv 16-17).
This study will require almost 40 children, aged 6, to participate. The reason for this is many children at this age they are on the ongoing process of learning and are on the verge to still develop their English vocabulary as well as the capacity to hold large amounts of vocabulary. Participants will be put into two groups, those who have English as a second language and those that have English as their native language. It is essential to have 20 participants in each group to avoid any biases.
Poor language development among the infants has been a problem in the societies. The problems is attributed to many factors such as the parental influence, and environment of the child (Berk, 2012). Many researchers have argued that such problem is mainly brought by exposing the infant to the television programs On the other hands some researchers also argues that television programs can enhance proper language development among the infants. The above views from the researchers are clearly illustrated from the article Baby Einstein's Not So Smart After All" by Alice Park.
Patty: Pertinent to the above answer, a recent “graduate” of BWB — about 6 years old — came up to our table at a community event, picked up our display copy of “Good Night, Gorilla,” and told us that “mama had been her first word as a baby and that “gorilla” had been her second word because she listened to and loved this book so much. I think this single story says so much about the impact that reading books aloud to children has on vocabulary. Children’s books contain 30% more vocabulary value than TV or ordinary adult-child conversation. 76% of all 5 year-old children entering Tri-County public schools test as “not proficient” in vocabulary.
Youth in Television have been portrayed in many different lights, anywhere from the criminal to the young at heart. With their resistance to the dominant culture, many studies have been done concerning the meaning of the political challenges to the social formation involving investigating cultural objects and media artifacts. Historically young people have fallen into distinct but dependent categories: youth-as-fun and youth-as-trouble. One might ask why any of this is pertinent to the study of television. However in the 1950's consumer boom, youth-as-fun became a major advertising strategy. Once advertisers identified teenagers as a valuable consumer, more and more positive images of youth became evident
As children learn new vocabulary words while learning to read, they understand and make connection with the sounding of the letters already acquired, to the word they see in print. Even though children learn the vocabulary meanings, usually through indirect experiences,
A child begins to form words somewhere between ten and eighteen months of age. The first word of a child is often momma or dada. The child repeats the sounds or utterances heard from the adults around him. Speech does not actually occur until the spoken word is deliberate and meant to communicate. By the time a child reaches kindergarten he has likely gained a 2000 – 3000 word vocabulary. While this number may seem excessive Dr. Mary E. Dahlgren states that a beginning kindergartener should have a 6000 word vocabulary for optimum grade and class performance (Dahlgren, 2008). In the classroom a student’s vocabulary size was an effective predictor of reading comprehension. Children with a restricted or limited vocabulary also had declining comprehension scores in the third grade. The elementary teacher can promote speaking by allowing the student the opportunity to speak and by listening to the student completely. Discussing a recently read book, or open discussions are ways in which a teacher can aid a student’s speech development.
My dark lord, I am weak to resist him, like a siren calling out to sailors, beckoning them to their deaths on the rocky shores. He lures me in and “kills” my time. Standing at thirty-two inches watching me every time I enter my room, sounds like a midget in a horror movie...nope nothing that terrifying, I am talking about what everyone calls the idiot box or the boob tube.
The study solidified the theory that social interaction is key to a toddler developing his language. This study proved that children with mothers who talk and text frequently, or disengage from their children, are less likely to learn the new words. This disengagement distracts the toddler and thus interrupts the important cognitive processes occurring in the brain to map the new words. This study was effective because of the intention and concern in its design. The researchers did an amazing job explaining the material and taking great pains to control as many
A foundational aspect of all children’s learning is oral language. Communication orally entails the ability to include four components of spoken language to incorporate, and build on, a child’s vocabulary and grammar. These four elements consist of the phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic components. Development of a child’s language skills should form together resulting in literacy success later in life. In order to master the teaching of oral language, three strategies are used. These include, the use of open –ended questions, talking about sophisticated words and incorporating sociodramatic play in to lessons, which in the end, enhance expressive and receptive oral language skills. Fellowes & Oakley and numerous other literature sources explore the significance of oral language in the child’s development.
Nearly every theory of language development recognizes that there is a critical period for learning language. During this critical period a child must receive environmental input for normal development. Parents and caregivers are an extremely important piece of this environmental input and the best way for caregivers to teach their children language is to simply talk to them—a lot. We know that children often say their first word between the ages of 11 and 14 months, and there continues to be a lot of variability in language development; is this a result of nature or nurture? Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007) studied the effects of media viewing on language
Children who watched television alone were 8.47 times more likely to have language delay when compared to children who interacted with their caregivers during television viewing (Dorey 47). As recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), “Children under the age of 2 should watch no television at all, and after age 2 watch no more than one to two hours of quality programming a day” (Bettinghaus 57). Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged. Parents should engage children in more conversational activities to avoid television-related delays to their children language development, which could impair their intellectual performance (Dorey 47).
Early language development predicts the amount of vocabulary knowledge as the child develops and is a key factor that is linked with later academic achievement (Pungello et al., 2009; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Also, background factors must be analyzed and assessed, in order to understand how language growth differs from one child to the next. Exposure to speech is very important and helps influence early development of language and the processing speed (Fernald, Marchman, & Wielder, 2013 as cited by Weisleder & Fernald, 2009). A study done by Kwon et al., (2013), found that play has a significant effect on the language complexity for children’s language use pertaining to the structure of play or activity setting (free play), however the gender of the parent did not influence the language growth for the child. Furthermore, children are able to identify familiar words when speech is directed towards the child and not over heard, facilitated vocabulary learning at the age of 24 months (Weislder & Fernald, 2013). For example, over hearing adult conversation is not as beneficial towards the child’s vocabulary learning.