LEARNING ENGLISH THROUGH CARTOONS.

Education is influenced by different factors, like family, group of friends, school and mass media. We consider that cartoons are also a complementary education for Primary Education students.

A lot of investigators say that the television is a fantastic tool in order to learn, because it represents a different way to catch the students attention.

We are sure that cartoons are a brilliant tool to learn a foreign language, in this case, English, which is one of the languages that has developed more resources for its learning.

We can say that all the kids love watching TV so they could have a good time while they are learning. They are in contact with it from a very young age, so teachers must seize this opportunity. From three to twelve years old is the perfect period to learn a language because in the first years of kids lives, they are like sponges and they are be able to imitate any language.

We think that the best cartoons to learn English or another language are those that have an educative purpose, short and simple dialogues, variety of contents and adventures or stories that entertain students.

It´s important to say that there are a lot of famous cartoons in English to learn this language, like “Dora the explorer”, “Caillou”, or “Peppa Pig”. We have chosen ”Gogo´s adventures” because in spite of not being a well know cartoon, it has a clear structure to teach and in our opinion, it’s one of the best cartoons for children who are beginners in English language. It means that it teaches basic aspects of the English language. Each chapter is about a specific topic, like numbers, animals, colors… using always new structures. So with this kind of cartoons students will learn grammar and vocabulary.

As we see it, it has the necessary requirements to achieve an appropriate teaching-learning process. It contains subtitles too, so the students will be able to understand better the dialogues when they are listening and reading them. Furthermore, teachers can use it to improve their student’s pronunciation, it’s something similar to teaching with flashcards, they see it, they listen it and they repeat it.

Here there are some chapters of “Gogo´s adventures” cartoons, where kids would learn different topics like the animals of the zoo, the numbers, the colors, and the verb to have. There are also a lot of chapters with different contents.

Animals of the zoo, the verb to be and demonstrative pronouns.

Numbers.

Clothes, colors, the verb to want and more vocabulary.

Verb to have and vocabulary.

As you can see watching this videos, Gogo is the main character, he is a fantasy character. Gogo teaches two kids called Jenny and Tony and he also shows them different places. Gogo also uses songs to be more dynamic in the teaching. We think that it is very useful because students learn better with music due to the rhythm. Owing to the contents we think that this cartoons are appropriate for children from 3 to 9 years old.

We made an interview to explain our opinion about learning English through cartoons as future English teachers. You can watch it if you press on the word "Interview" :

INTERVIEW

Finally, we found an interesting link that belongs to EFL club: http://gogos.clubefl.gr/

In this link there are different kind of exercises with the different chapters of Gogo´s adventures cartoons. But we just can do the exercises of two chapters because we aren't members of EFL.

We just said on the interview that it is necessary to work with the chapters in class and doing this kind of exercises students may learn how to spell words, vocabulary, pronunciation, associate sound with images, guess the words, associate sound with words, etc.

Teachers from the XXI century must have technological knowledge. So they are able to create varied exercises to work the different skills using different programs like HotPotatoes, Edilim, Jclick, etc. We think it is very useful for the teaching-learning process because teachers can design different exercises that motivate students.

This is an excuse to encourage teachers to use the new technologies and make their pupil’s tasks more attractive.