You may have read the Blog from Wendy, the Director of Studies at UIC, posted on 5th February 2010 answering one of the questions we are most often asked by students – Why am I stuck at this level? – why can’t I improve more? Well, when you come to do an English course at UIC  we want to give you as much exposure as possible to the world around – after all that’s one of the main reasons you chose to come to London to study.

There was a lot of advice in the article – suggestions of different things you could do outside the school to help you and here we are going to  look at one of the suggestions – watching TV and listening to the Radio. British TV and radio is a very high quality and perhaps most importantly you can watch and listen to a huge variety of programmes so there is always something for you – it’s also free and most of it is available over the internet now so if you are living somewhere where you don’t have a TV or you don’t have a radio then you can still access TV and radio if you have a computer or a device which can access the Internet – a phone or an itouch for example.

How is the TV structured in the UK? There are 5 main channels – BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. You can pick up these channels on any TV – the signals are still analogue in London so you don’t need any special digital equipment. If you have a digital receiver on your TV then you can access many more channels – all completely free, for example BBC3, BBC4, ITV2, film4 and so on – there are up to 50 channels free. You can also watch many of these shows on the Internet – and with the BBC iplayer you can watch most of the programmes on BBC any time in the 7 days after they were first shown.

For students wanting to learn English this is a fantastic opportunity – high quality TV, any time you want to watch, no adverts, ability to watch in small sections and so on and so on – it is really fantastic and a great addition supplement to the work you are doing in classes at UIC.

 Wendy especially recommends watching soap operas and the news! If you like soap operas, ask your host family to recommend a good one and to tell you the story! The best known soap operas in the UK are Eastenders (on the BBC)  and Coronation Street (on ITV) as well as others from around the world like Neighbours. If you look at the websites for the soap operas you can find out the story lines and information about the characters – another good opportunity to practice your English – reading this time.

Wendy also recommends listening to the radio – BBC Radio 4 or Radio 5 Live are talk radio stations with lots of discussions and there are dozens of music stations as well – BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio3 (for classical music) plus some of the better known London stations – Absolute, Capital and Kiss. You can easily find the frequency of these stations and they are all also available as digital broadcasts. What’s more … the BBC stations can all be accessed on the iplayer and most fo the stations are on internet radio!

There is no excuse for not doing a bit of private practice!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 10:32 am and is filed under Learning English, Life in London, UIC London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.