Tinky Winky Taught Me German
July 2, 2007 by kate baggott
Filed under Baby Care
Tinky Winky taught me German.
It’s not something I am proud of, especially since I am a language teacher and used to be a children’s media researcher.
My oldest son was born not quite 10 months after we moved from Canada to Germany. I had worked as an English teacher during my pregnancy and didn’t get out much. I struggled through our first year here with a 100-word shopping vocabulary.
I didn’t feel confident to branch out until my son started crawling and we needed a relaxation diversion to get through the day. That was when the German-language version of Teletubbies became part of our lives. It was the repetition, I think, that showed me all was not impossible, I could understand. My son and I learned new vocabulary and new songs from the show’s mini-films about the lives of children.
Our experience was not typical. According to a study published in Media Psychology, toddlers still learn their first words better from other people than from television.
Sure, children younger than 22 months might find the Teletubbies entertaining, but they aren’t acquiring any vocabulary, found study author Marina Krcmar, associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University.
In the study, Professor Krcmar compared the ability of children ages 15 – 24 months to learn new words presented as part of the Teletubbies with their ability to learn the new words from an adult speaker in the same room. The toddlers didn’t correctly identify an object when taught the new word by the television program, but they could connect the word with the object when the word was presented by the adult.
“With the tremendous success of programs such as Teletubbies that target very young children, it has become important to understand what very young children are taking away from these programs,” Krcmar said. “We would like to think it could work, that Teletubbies and other programs can teach initial language skills. That is not true.”
“During the early stages of language acquisition, and for children who still have fewer than 50-word vocabularies, toddlers learn more from an adult speaker than they do from Teletubbies,” Krcmar said.
Current recommendations hold that children under 2 should not watch television.
The fact that Teletubbies didn’t teach initial language skills does not surprise me. When my son was a fan of the show, I honestly thought the Teletubbies just squeaked and made noises. It wasn’t until one day that the captions had been left on and I read them that I realized the Teletubbies were actually talking, in English, no less! After that, if I really paid attention, I could make out their words.
They speak baby talk. In German, they say “winke winke” which means wavey, wavey or wave by-byes. You certainly wouldn’t find that in any dictionary.
On the other hand, the mini-movies with real live children are more interesting from a linguistic perspective.