World Englishes in New Amsterdam and H20: A Tool to Enhance Learners' Listening Comprehension Skills via TV Series

Abstract

[eng] In today’s technologically driven world, audiovisual materials have become teachers’ best ally to transform the traditional learning process into an engaging, stimulating and highly motivating task for students. Indeed, several teachers have acknowledged films, TV series, documentaries and videos as their quintessential tool for enhancing the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL). Albeit, on the basis of my previous academic experience, English coursebooks were considered to be the main and most reliable source of information and they only worked with the two so-called standard models of English, that is, British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). As a consequence, students were commonly unaware of the phenomenon termed World Englishes, which refers to the existence of many varieties of English around the world. Thus, the present paper aims at examining the efficacy and usefulness of audiovisual materials as a language tool in EFL classrooms. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the use of two television series (New Amsterdam and H2O: Just Add Water), each with a distinct type of accent to help 4th year Obligatory Secondary Education students improve their listening comprehension skills while developing their receptiveness towards different English accents.