Is Television Affecting Childrens Language - Research Proposal Example

Is Television Affecting Children’s Language? byline : Name, University Abstract Human civilization has been adapting itself to ever changing situations. Technical development has been the remarkable in past few decades. On one hand it has made possible various things and on the other hand it has posed some problems as well. Information technology has seen a tremendous growth. Television has played an important role in transmission of information and entertainment both. Recently it is being noticed that children are developing language problems and television is being blamed for it as a major factor. This study is aimed to find out the implications of television on children and how is it affecting them. Introduction Television has become an integral part of our life today. Since its advent, there has been an ongoing debate on the virtues and faults of this electronic media. Recently it has again come on the center stage as people have begun questioning its effect on children and specially their language. This issue is being raised at various forums and there is growing concern in people regarding detoriation in the language of children. School principals who are in direct contact with children and have noticed a significant change recently, have expressed their concern. Also people, who are in the field of speech pathology, have experienced an increase in the cases of children coming to them for correction of language problems. We will discuss this in more detail later. Televisions effect on children has been in focus for quite some time on various other issues as well. A study has been done in the UK on televisions as a contributory factor in accent change in adolescents. This study shows that there has been a change in the accent of the adolescents. One factor that has been proposed as a reason for these changes is the influence of the broadcast media or in more clear words, the television. This study also says that personal interaction remains the primary factor affecting language. For change of language it considers television as a secondary factor. In the context of our study, it is not the change of language but lack of language rather. For learning of the language, interaction is not just the primary but the only way. In absence of interaction, children do not get an opportunity to learn. The advent of television has given the parent an excuse and a way out to steal their time away from the children. Since the children are occupied by watching television, the parents do not feel guilty that the children are being neglected. But the fact is that being occupied is not equivalent to being taken care of. If the children did not have access to television and demanded their parent’s attention by crying or whatever methods, then the parents would have been bound to spend time with them and interact with them as used to happen in the olden days. To highlight this issue we chose this topic. Our process of research and its conclusion will hopefully bring about a much desired change in the attitude of parents towards their children and will also help them understand the role of television in the entire context. To study whether television is actually affecting today’s children’s language, we conducted a study. We wanted to find out: QR1- Is there a problem with language development of young children? As discussed earlier, the answer to this question should be affirmative. By the study we wanted to get specific details. QR 2- Is this problem due to television? Once we establish the fact that there is a language problem, we needed to study are there other factors affecting their language? And how is television affecting their language. This study was done with the children of less than five years of age from six different schools. We picked up 20 children from each school as a sample and studied their language development and their family backgrounds. We also studied their parents by giving them a questionnaire. By first hand interaction with the participants we had concrete information based on which we can find out whether the children actually have problem with language development. This part is simpler to find as the statistics itself will prove it. What is more complex is to know how much we can blame the television for this problem. Therefore, the rationales to do this study is divided into two parts: - First to get the statistics and then to study the causes. We believe that human beings by nature do not want to neglect their offspring but if there is any neglect without their intention, and if it can be pointed out, they would be interested in taking the corrective measures and improve the situation. As for the heuristic value, this research can be extended to several areas, such as the effect of television on children’s moral values. The depiction of sex and violence on the television definitely has an impact on children’s mind. Such an impact at an early age may be detrimental. This is an issue that concerns entire world. Epistemology & theoretical perspectives used: The epistemology of this essay should be objectivity, because this research will use data collection to support and get the results. It is based on the statistical data collected. We try to analyze the information we thus collect. As for the theoretical perspective, cause-and-effect explanation could be used in the research. From the six schools selected, the observation and data collection will be done. The advantages and disadvantages of television and the reason why it is affecting children’s language will be studied too. The relationships between children’s language problem and television will be analyzed as cause-and-effect part. Literature review In order to formulate a new research question, “A basic review of the literature is a required step.” (Baxter&Babbie, 2005, p.145) According to Bubin, the literature review here is “exhaustive”. (2005, p.244) These researches including primary and secondary sources studied the print media and electronic media regarding television’s effect on children’s language problem. Is there a real problem with children’s language development? There was an interview of Professor Sheena Reilly who is a member of Speech Pathology Australia on Channel 10’s national morning show. She is also the director of the speech pathology department at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. This interview was about child speech and language development. She discussed the reasons for problems and told about the indicators for parents when they must get the signal that it is time for them to seek help. Another indicator of people’s growing concern regarding television’s adverse impact on children’s language can be seen in the letters to the editor of the news papers. (The Herald Sun, VIC, 26th March ’07 and 28th March’07) There was a media release by the Australian Primary Principals Association. It said that the speech and language difficulty is increasing in children. They pointed out to the television as the villain. Their opinion was that due to the television families spend less time in talking to each other as they spend more and more time watching television. Even the media has covered this problem. The Sunday Age, VIC, carried an article on this topic on 18th March ’07. Here Rene Switzer has reported the alarming trend that more children are starting school with language difficulty. Here again fingers have been pointed at the television. The article says that too much television is killing the conversation time in the families, which is the main reason behind rising language problem in children. Leonie Trimper, the president of Australian Primary Principals Association says that children are suffering from a delayed speech development. She also pointed out the largest increase in it in the recent years. This increase is related to family life. Now families are not spending time together at the dinner table talking about the happenings of the day. Instead the children are sitting in front of the television even at dinnertime. The parents are busy at work. Michael Carr- Gregg , a child psychologist also says that nowadays children are not spending enough time in talking to adults. He says there is enough data to prove that sit around a dining table for dinner, and have conversation at dinnertime helps improve language development in children. The psychologists in Britain are also running a campaign called “back to the table”. This is centered around getting the families to have meals together around the table regularly. According to the speech pathologist from the education department, Ms Fran Callinan, the number of children getting referred to speech pathologists, has doubled in the past 25 years. She says that now children are getting lesser exposure to talk. The learning process of children is through watching and hearing other people. They can watch and hear a computer but it does not talk back. That is why they do not get practice in talking. Sometimes they speak with wrong sounds like saying ‘tar’ instead of ‘car’. Sometimes they have wrong grammar, like instead of ‘she is my mummy’ they may say, ‘her my mummy’. There is a problem with phonological awareness also. If a child is asked to tell a word which rhymes with ‘cat’ and ‘sat’, and the child says,’fall’ then he lacks the phonetic awareness. According professor Reilley, language disorder is caused by a complex factors. There could be biological or genetic problem that determines the growth of brain in children. But the environment and interaction is what helps them build their vocabulary and richness of the language. The Western Australian(WA, 26th march, 2007) carried an article on TV impairs kids speech development by Bethany Hiatt. It says that children spend too much time watching television and not enough time at the dinner table. This is hampering their language development. Paediatric speech pathologist Mellanie Sherwood also says that children’s language and skills of communication grow when they interact with their families. The Age also reports a similar article.(march 18, 2007) It talks about Ms Komuves who is a speech pathologist. She says that out of 30 children, 18 had language problem. She says that if children do not go to a kindergarten and attend the formal school straight away then that is their first exposure to school and to the language which here is English. Another factor that she mentions is the socio-economic background of the children’s families. She says that “children coming from low socio-economic families normally have lower language abilities. The reason is that the language they hear at home is not as complex.” Increase in the number of working mothers is also a factor. When children are put in a day care center, they do not have a one-on-one interaction with the caretaker. Language problem puts the children under stress. They are unable to express themselves and that makes them to feel alienated. According to Mable Rice, director of the child language doctoral programme and the Kansas University, these children are more likely to be teased by their peers and making friends becomes difficult for them.( May7, 2003) As a solution to this growing problem special care is being taken by some organizations to help the children overcome this problem. In these programmes children are encouraged to get into ‘early talk’. This encourages children who are few months old to upto five years to talk. Children’s charity CAN had done a research in 2006 and they found that the percentage of children who have impoverished speech and language, at the time of beginning their formal education is from 50 % to 84%. (Daily Mail, 10th May, 2007)These children have problem in putting together a full and correct sentence and they also have difficulty in following instructions. This research showed that the parents are now spending more time watching television and cleaning the house than they spend in talking to their children. As a solution the charity came up with a teaching kit for the staff in the nurseries. This will help them to encourage the babies and toddlers to talk to each other and also to adults. This scheme has been endorsed by children’s minister Beverley Hughes. Now it will be used in 200 Sure Start children centers that are backed by government. Approximately 160,000 children should be benefiting from it. They have already started work on extending this to private and voluntary nurseries. This will help to reach to many mote thousand children. The American Speech –Language- Hearing- Association( ASHA) also says that the first few years of a child are very crucial for his language development. They learn by hearing other people speak. They have pointed out another problem arising from too much tv watching. They tell people to check the volume of the TV as too high a volume can impair hearing of a child. The above literature reviews are valuable inputs in our study. Some of them are from USA but most of them are from Australia. This gives us a global vies as well as a local viewpoint of the problem. Since most of them are first hand experiences of people who are dealing with young children directly, there views and opinions carry weight. All these sources emphasize that there is a problem with children’s language development and they also bring out the increase in numbers of cases but they do not elaborate much on other factors responsible for this problem. Our research is taking a sample of students from six different schools to help us get correct statistics. Interviewing their parents will helps us analyze the real cause behind the problem. Proposed methodology & proposed methods of data collection Our sample is 120 children from six different schools. There are six different organizations and the unit of analysis is children as an individual, and later their families as individual units. The unit of analysis is children and their families because fromt eh children we gauge the level of language development and from their families we get the information that would help us reach a conclusion. Since our study has lack of human interaction as a factor and language in itself is an interactive media, we kept our method also interactive. According to Baxter (2004, p.167), the questionnaires are often used as an integral part of other research methods, and they should clear, non-repetition, and in order. The survey questions are specific responses. By using the questionnaire with their parents, we get to pinpoint where the problem is lying. Questionnaire for the parents a) Are both of you working? ( gives us a data to back up the hypothesis that working parent’s children have this problem as they spend less time with them) b) What are your working hours? (gives us data on how much time the parents actually have at home) c) How much time do you spend with your children?( gives us exact time spent with children) d) How much do you spend doing housework? ( This helps to cross question the earlier question and get an authentic answer.) e) Where do you have your dinner? In front of the TV/ at the dining table( this helps us get the data to prove the fact that having dinner together improves language development in children) f) How many times do you have dinner together as a family on the dining table? (This helps us to know whether they eat together or not and how frequently) g) Do you realize that your child has a language problem? ( This is to know their awareness on the subject ) h) How much time your child spends watching TV? ( This gives us data on television’s role in the problem) If their answer is ‘yes’ to Question g), then link to Question i) i)What steps have you taken to help your child overcome this problem.( This shows their concern) There is another questionnaire that helps us identify the problem in children by asking specific questions. This is used in the schools with the children with the help of the teacher and also objective study of the child. This is also a specific responses style of questions: How do we identify that a child has a language problem? a) How old is the child?( Helps to determine the sample, it should be 5 years or less. A child who is five years old and cannot do any of the following then he or she may be having a problem) b) Can the child make a sentence of about six words, using correct grammar? c) Can the child talk about things that are taking place or have taken place in the past or may take place. d) Is the child able to explain the function of objects. e) Can he/she remember and follow three commands given at once like get up , put on your shoes and open the door. f) Can he/she explain their feelings and ideas. g) Does the child show interest in reading, writing and counting. h) Does the child have clear speech. i) Can he/she understand opposites like hot and cold, up and down. All the questions used in both the questionnaires are close-ended questions, which require a specific answer and thus a specific data collection, and there would be no scope of misinterpretation of questions or vague replies by respondents. The research methods are questionnaires and content analysis, because “The researcher’s personal idiosyncrasies and biases should not enter into the findings.” Content analysis has an advantage because of its potential to identify trends over long periods of time.(Baxter&Babbie, 2005, p.141) The subject here is a kind of behaviour research. Researchers use manual analysis of the data thus collected. We could have used multiple methods of data collection in this research, but it will make the study too complicated. Meanwhile, it is time-consuming and more difficult to analysis as we are doing it manually. The Variables of this research are language status of the children, time spent with parents, time spent in front of the television. It is a combination of dependent variables and independent variables. Since we have specific data on all of them, the researchers can do a comparative study to analyze it and draw an inference of their inter relation. After that we can use both sampling methods of probability and non-probability. Some of the survey questions have figures and some of them have details that need to be analyzed. We can involve nominal level variables for measurements. Ratio level can also be used in addition to it. We can find some specific relation between television and language development in children. Proposed Outcomes There are many literature reviews about primary and secondary sources above. We have discussed the methods and techniques in the methods section. Now we need to get to a conclusion. According to Baxter&Babbie (2005, p.39-42), the research design of time dimension is longitudinal studies, which belongs to cohort study. As a group of children and their families, this research gets content to analyze. Once we have identified language problem in children and their exposure to the television, we need to draw a link between the two. The research questions that we had taken in the beginning are result specific. From the responses to the survey through questionnaires, we get some specific numbers and some content to be analyzed. According to the research questions and survey responses, we will be to establish the relation between television viewing and language development in children. This will help the parents to become aware of the importance of their personal time spent with the children and the importance of their interaction with them. The school authorities will also become aware and will try to compensate for the gap left at the homes. They may also play an important role by educating the parents on personal interaction with their children. With a combined effect we can see an improvement in the society at large and can expect this alarming situation to be rectified. Personnel & Budget This research does not require much technical support as it is all interactive. As per Baron, Costs of data entry, supervision of subjects, space for completing questionnaires, paper, printing, and paper storage should be calculated in the budget.” (Baron, 1999) We will require some personnel to conduct the research as we need to cover 120 children and their parents. Apart from the stationery needed we will need time investment in first coordinating with the schools, and then with the parents. Accrding to the availability of time of the parents for the survey, it may stretch over a period of time that will have a cost factor. We need to calculate that in our cost factor. Ethical issues & Precautions should be made to protect the research subjects Since our study is dealing with human beings, we need to be careful about protecting their privacy. We can code the students and their families by certain numbers or alphabets to do the study without bring up any particular names as it coud be very personal and sensitive issue. We may not disclose the names of the schools as well to help protect their reputation and secrecy of individual’s information. Plain Language Statement Date: Student Name: Address: Contact Number: Project Title: Is television affecting children’s language development? Supervisor Name: YYYY Supervisor Location: XX University Supervisor Tel. NO. Supervisor Fax NO. Supervisor E-mail: My name is XXXX and I am studying for my Bachelor of Media & Communication at XX University. A research project is an important component of the course and I am undertaking mine under the supervision of YYYY. I invite you to consider participating in this project, the details of which appear below. The aim of the project is to investigate whether television is affecting children’s language development. I believe the findings of this research project will be useful in improving the alarming situation in the society where more and more young children are being identified with language development related problems. I am seeking XX school students and their parents to do the questionnaire. The procedure would take approximately 10 minutes of your time, and would be undertaken at your convenience. No findings will be published which could identify any individual participant. Anonymity is assured by our procedure, in which you are not asked to provide your name on your questionnaire response sheet. Access to data is restricted to my Supervisor and to myself. Coded data are stored for six years, as prescribed by University regulations. If you have any queries, please contact me as per the above contact details. Thank you for participating. Reference: Adler, E S & Clark, R 2003, How it is done: An invitation to social research, 2 nd edition, Thompson-Wadsworth, Southbank, VIC.- Chapter 6 & Appendix Baron. J., & Siepmann, M., 1999. “Techniques for creating and using Web questionnaires in research and teaching.” Retrieved 15 October 2003 from the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology, viewed 23 May 2005, Baxter, L. A. & Babbie, E., 2004, “Surveys”, in Researching Media: Texts, Audiences and Industries Reader 8.1, Geelong, Australia, (2005), p.167-183 Clark, L., Daily Mail, 10th May, 2007, Toddlers to get lessons in talking as tv kills conversation. Hiatt, B., 26th March 2007, The Western Australian, The West Australian, WA – 26 March07 TV impairs kids speech development Komuves , march 18, 2007 ,The Age, Sunday Age, VIC – 18 March 07  TV blamed for rise in child-speech problems Rice, M. May7, 2003, Renowned child language researchers named first Merrill Professor at KU,) http://www.news.ku.edu/ Sheena, R. Interview at Channel 10’s national morning show, 9am with David and Kim.  http://www.ten.com.au/ten/9am-with-david-kim-video.html Switzer,R., 18th March ’07, The Sunday Age, VIC Ooh, ah, eeh – Lauren makes all the right sounds Wimmer R D & Dominick, J R 2006, Mass media research: An introduction, 8th edition, Thompson-Wadsworth, Southbank, VIC. -Chapters 6, Read More

To study whether television is actually affecting today’s children’s language, we conducted a study. We wanted to find out: QR1- Is there a problem with language development of young children? As discussed earlier, the answer to this question should be affirmative. By the study we wanted to get specific details. QR 2- Is this problem due to television? Once we establish the fact that there is a language problem, we needed to study are there other factors affecting their language? And how is television affecting their language.

This study was done with the children of less than five years of age from six different schools. We picked up 20 children from each school as a sample and studied their language development and their family backgrounds. We also studied their parents by giving them a questionnaire. By first hand interaction with the participants we had concrete information based on which we can find out whether the children actually have problem with language development. This part is simpler to find as the statistics itself will prove it.

What is more complex is to know how much we can blame the television for this problem. Therefore, the rationales to do this study is divided into two parts: - First to get the statistics and then to study the causes. We believe that human beings by nature do not want to neglect their offspring but if there is any neglect without their intention, and if it can be pointed out, they would be interested in taking the corrective measures and improve the situation. As for the heuristic value, this research can be extended to several areas, such as the effect of television on children’s moral values.

The depiction of sex and violence on the television definitely has an impact on children’s mind. Such an impact at an early age may be detrimental. This is an issue that concerns entire world. Epistemology & theoretical perspectives used: The epistemology of this essay should be objectivity, because this research will use data collection to support and get the results. It is based on the statistical data collected. We try to analyze the information we thus collect. As for the theoretical perspective, cause-and-effect explanation could be used in the research.

From the six schools selected, the observation and data collection will be done. The advantages and disadvantages of television and the reason why it is affecting children’s language will be studied too. The relationships between children’s language problem and television will be analyzed as cause-and-effect part. Literature review In order to formulate a new research question, “A basic review of the literature is a required step.” (Baxter&Babbie, 2005, p.145) According to Bubin, the literature review here is “exhaustive”. (2005, p.244) These researches including primary and secondary sources studied the print media and electronic media regarding television’s effect on children’s language problem.

Is there a real problem with children’s language development? There was an interview of Professor Sheena Reilly who is a member of Speech Pathology Australia on Channel 10’s national morning show. She is also the director of the speech pathology department at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. This interview was about child speech and language development. She discussed the reasons for problems and told about the indicators for parents when they must get the signal that it is time for them to seek help.

Another indicator of people’s growing concern regarding television’s adverse impact on children’s language can be seen in the letters to the editor of the news papers. (The Herald Sun, VIC, 26th March ’07 and 28th March’07) There was a media release by the Australian Primary Principals Association. It said that the speech and language difficulty is increasing in children. They pointed out to the television as the villain. Their opinion was that due to the television families spend less time in talking to each other as they spend more and more time watching television.

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