Do you remember when your parents used to warn you about watching too much television because it’ll give you ‘square eyes’? Well, times have changed and Netflix series are now seen as a valuable (and fun) tool for language learning for students in the classroom and at home.
We’re going to talk about five of the best series to learn English on Netflix and various ways that you can use them in your classes.
Firstly, let’s start with some useful tips to help your students improve their listening skills and remember vocabulary while they watch TV series.
5 tips to learn English with TV series
- If your students are reluctant to watch TV series without subtitles, start by watching a short clip without subtitles, then with subtitles and finally without subtitles again. This will help to increase their listening skills and confidence.
- TV shows can be overwhelming, especially for beginners due to new vocabulary, grammar and accents. Make things simpler for your students by asking them to focus on just one aspect, such as writing down sentences from the clip which contain the present simple. If you’d like more ideas like this for different levels, then check out our blog post on teaching English through television.
- Introduce your learners to ‘Language Reactor’ (formerly known as ‘Learn Language with Netflix’). It’s a free Google Chrome extension that shows two sets of subtitles (one in English and one in their native language). It also highlights key words by level and gives definitions and translations of words in a single click.
- Encourage your students to watch TV series that they are genuinely interested in. The more they are interested in the series, the more likely they are to watch it and want to discuss it with you!
- After your students have watched something together, set them an activity to discuss what they’ve watched. For example, you can ask your students to design a book cover for the TV show. For more ideas check out 4 activities for using TV as a medium for learning.
5 recommended Netflix TV shows for English learners
Let’s talk about five TV shows on Netflix for different English levels and ages. It’s important to note that Black Mirror, Killing Eve and After Life are only suitable for adult learners as they contain some swearing and adult themes.
Black Mirror
Imagine that you’re planning a lesson about technology. You have two choices: 1. do another textbook unit about ‘surfing the web’ and ‘why mobile phones are bad for teenagers’, or 2. watch an episode of Black Mirror and discuss some real thought-provoking, eye-opening and outright unethical ways that technology can be used.
Each episode of Black Mirror has its own interesting story, ranging from killer mechanical bees to eye implants.
Your students could easily spend an hour debating the ethics and stories of each episode, and come up with potential solutions to avoid them happening in the future.
Another fun task is asking your students to predict the endings of each episode (which is always tricky to do due to Black Mirror’s fantastic plot twists!).
Killing Eve
Are you looking for a TV show that will expose your students to as many accents as possible? Then you need to show them Killing Eve.
The story is about Villanelle, a spy who continuously changes her identity in order to get closer to her targets. The actress Jodie Comer does a fantastic and effortless job at switching accents and languages throughout the TV series.
Your students will hear Villanelle using Scottish, Russian, Australian, Received Pronunciation and General American English accents, as well as speaking in English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Russian.
You can find compilation clips on YouTube with the various accents and discuss the differences between them with your students.
After Life
After Life is about a man named Tony who loses his wife to cancer. In every episode, Tony finds a new reason to continue living his life. One minute you and your students will be laughing at Tony’s jokes and blunt one-lines, and the next you will be in tears. It’s a true emotional rollercoaster.
This Netflix series is a great introduction for students to British humour and culture. It’s dry, witty and quite often dark and sarcastic. Your students will learn about sarcastic tones and the role of sarcasm in British culture.
Also, with such a mix of accents and dialects from across the UK, this series is perfect for exposing your learners to different British accents.
Wednesday
This series follows the story of Wednesday Addams and how she develops her psychic abilities during her year at school.
Wednesday’s dark humour involves using a lot of puns (a joke which uses different possible meanings of a word). She often uses idioms and expressions in a more literal sense, making them a great teaching point for your students.
An example of this is when Thing (a little hand which follows Wednesday around) sits on her shoulder. She then says ‘careful, that’s my cold shoulder’, playing around with the idiom ‘give someone the cold shoulder’.
The TV show has a mix of British and American accents, so it could also be a great series to compare the two varieties.
Wednesday features some very mild swearing and offensive hand gestures, making it more suitable for teen and adult learners.
Pocoyo
This is one of the best Netflix series for beginners and young learners. It’s a classic, so it deserved to be on this list.
Pocoyo is a cute and innocent character who goes on little adventures and does fun activities each episode.
The language is very simple. The narrator often asks Pocoyo basic questions, to which he responds with very short answers, making it perfect for beginner-level listening comprehension.
You can also turn off the sound and ask learners to describe what Pocoyo is doing, helping your students to learn new vocabulary for everyday activities and objects.
For young learners, Cambridge and Pocoyo teamed up to create some fun free videos and activities to use in your lessons. You can watch and download them here.
Now you’re ready to start using Netflix TV series in the classroom with your students. All you need to do is decide which series you’re going to start with!
Share with us which Netflix series you and your students love to watch in the comments.