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.

Abstract

This study explores the possibility of integrating television materials into English teaching and learning at the National University of Rwanda for the benefit of second year English students in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Television materials offer Rwandan EFLIESL students the authentic language input they need as they are not exposed to native speakers of English. Such materials can improve their oral and aural abilities in the language. It is believed that television as a learning tool can captivate the learners' interest as it communicates through sound and image. Incorporating TV materials (i.e. live as well as recorded materials from several TV programmes such as news, documentaries) can contribute to the acquisition and development of the students' language skills. Different research techniques were used to obtain the data for this study. These included interviews, questionnaires and document analysis. The interviews were conducted with English lecturers in the Department of English at the NUR. The latter also responded to a questionnaire. The second year English students, the target group of this study too completed a questionnaire directed at them. Additional data was collected from an analysis of the content of academic English programmes in use at the NUR