对美剧的看法

My opinions on American TV dramas

With the development of the Internet providing us with easy access to American TV dramas, the youth in China are keen on watching them. On account of the funny characters and the worship for heroism, they own a large number of audiences in Chinese market. Some people argue that watching them can improve their language learning; there is also another voice saying that American TV dramas have nothing to do with learning English. Instead, they have bad influences on students. However, just as the saying goes, there is no garden without weeds. Whether watching the dramas will have a positive or negative effect on students mainly depends on the way we select and appreciate them.

On the one hand, the unique charm of English in the dramas can greatly improve the young people’s interest in learning this language. "Growing pains", "Sherlock Henry" and “The desperate housewives” are appealing with their standard pronunciations, intonations and flexile oral English in life, helping us develop a language sense. What’s more, positive contents can not only broaden the field of vision and rich our personality, but also cultivate our social responsibility for family and country.

To reap the benefits above, we should have great insight when we choose dramas to watch. With the differences between Chinese and western cultures which can not be ignored, we should choose TV series with positive themes rather than dramas with too much violence and sex. Watching American TV dramas can be regarded as an opportunity to relax ourselves after completing the heavy homework. In addition, in order to improve English level, we can intentionally choose to hide the Chinese subtitles so that our full attention can be paid to listening to the pronunciations of the actors. It is not until we have taken the advice above and adopt a positive attitude that we can benefit from watching them.

What we should bear in mind is that without an appropriate choice for American TV dramas, they won’t do any good to our study, and they may even have a negative impact on personal development. The so called "individualism caused by too much showing of heroism in the dramas will affect students; the huge cost and the vanity of the drama

content will lead to "money worship", especially for the youth; violent actions and alcoholic addiction will bring a defect to the character building of students as well.

Therefore, people’s anxiety towards the youth watching American TV dramas is rationalized and quite understandable. There exist a variety of TV drama, not every of which will bring benefits to the youth, let alone some of them still can impact the youth negatively. Teenagers who haven’t developed the ability to exactly distinguish the better ones from the bad ones certainly need help and guidance from teachers and parents. Their intervention may timely prevent teenagers from being spoiled by the TV series.

In short, for the foreign cultures, we have to adopt a cautious attitude, just as the saying goes ,”Take the essence, goes to its dregs”. As long as we select and appreciate the proper TV dramas in an appropriate way, then it will have a positive effect on us, both on our learning English and on our daily life. During this process we need parents and teachers’ attention and intervention, who are supposed to give children guidance about watching these dramas when necessary, just like a rose with thorns needs a correct picking way.