The Multimedia Principle (Fletcher & Tobias, 2005) states that people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The potential for English language learners to increase their comprehension of video through the use of captions, which graphically display the same language as the spoken dialogue, has been…

This article investigates pathways between the exposure to an entertainment-education (E-E) television drama called "Three Rivers" and positive discussion of organ donation among viewers of the drama in the United States. A cross-sectional survey was conducted using an online advertising for a period of one week. Survey participants…

This article reports on a survey with 170 school-age children growing up with two or more languages in the Canadian province of Ontario where English is the majority language, French is a minority language, and numerous other minority languages may be spoken by immigrant or Indigenous residents. Within this context the study focuses on minority…

Adolescent consumption of screen media continues to increase. A variety of theoretical constructs hypothesize the impact of media content on health-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. This study uses a coding instrument based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Risk Behavior Survey to analyze health behavior contained in…

Cohesion, or the connectedness of discourse, has been recognized as playing a crucial role in both language production and comprehension processes. Researchers have debated about the "right" number and classification of cohesive devices, as well as about their interaction with coherence and/or genre. The present study proposes an integrative model…

The use of podcasting has attracted the attention of teachers because it is content-rich and is of wide general interest. Users can listen to podcasts via the Internet or download them on to a portable music player. Some also offer video or animation to make the contents more interesting and easier to understand. Accordingly, podcasts that tend to…

This practical paper discusses the effect of explicit instruction to raise Japanese EFL learners' pragmatic awareness using online discourse completion tasks. The five-part tasks developed by the authors use American TV drama scenes depicting particular speech acts and include explicit instruction in these speech acts. 46 Japanese EFL college…

A quantitative-qualitative historical content analysis of selected Seinfeld television comedy episodes was conducted for this study. Episodes were analyzed for the presence of health-related messages pertaining to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's health priority areas, which include the most harmful risk behaviors affecting…

This study examined the extent to which glossaries may affect the percentage of known words (coverage) in television programs. The transcripts of 51 episodes of 2 television programs ("House" and "Grey's Anatomy") were analyzed using Range (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) to create glossaries consisting of the low-frequency (less frequent than…

Students were trained to perceive filled pauses (FP) as a bad speech habit. In a series of classroom sensitivity training activities, followed by students being rewarded to observe twenty minutes of live television from the public media, no differences between male and female Business Communication students was revealed. The practice of teaching…