What you learn is what you watch. Behaviouristic discourse strategies in children TV shows

Abstract

TV shows for children are generally linked purely with entertainment, although there are certain shows that look to teach something to their audience. This teaching is carried out through many different strategies. Little attention has been paid to this type of shows as educative devises and also to the kind of strategies they use in order to reach the purpose of teaching. In general, also little attention has been paid to how the process of teaching and learning is carried out through this type of shows and what are the characteristics of this process. This study focuses on discursive techniques used by these shows and what specific discourse strategies are used in order to achieve the goal of teaching. The discourse strategies analysed by this work correspond to behaviouristic model of learning in the context of children TV shows. For that purpose, 29 shows and 2 movies were used as data. This data was analysed strictly under the scope of behaviourism. The shows were analysed and their dialogues transcribed in order to found and put forward key instances of discursive strategies of behaviourism present in these shows. Throughout the analysis of these shows, five main discursive strategies were found, namely: Stimulus and Response, Repetition, Reward and Punishment, Sugar Coating, and Reinforcement. Key passages of the transcripts from the shows are included in order to show how these strategies actually work in discourse and, at the same time, in the context of children TV shows. The purpose of this study is to thoroughly explain the ways in which the teaching techniques from behaviourism are present in these shows and how these techniques constitute an important part of the content of these shows. In this study professionals related to the field of pedagogy and education can found very useful insight into the applicability of behaviourist discursive techniques in teaching. In fact, the results show that behaviourism, and its discursive strategies, have a strong presence among educational TV shows for children. Some limitations were found while carrying out this study, for instance, and most important, it was not possible to learn how the uses of these discursive strategies are received by the target audience of these shows, namely; children. KEYWORDS: Behaviourism,