English: Media

This straight-talking ten-part set, adapted from the popular series developed for students to enhance their test-taking skills, combines serious academic content with a humorous presentation style to help make the rules of English more accessible. Elements such as high-tech special effects, computer animation, and entertaining vignettes boost retention and confidence while reinforcing essential principles through concise explanations and engaging examples.

This program follows English through the 18th and 19th centuries, from attempts at reforming and standardizing the tongue in the Age of Reason to the soaring verse of Romanticism and the verbal prudishness of the Victorian era. Linguistic milestones are highlighted by original editions of critical texts, including Newton’s Opticks, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Thomas Sheridan’s British Education, and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Other key figures discussed include Jonathan Swift, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth. (52 minutes)

The Cerebellum Teaching System equips you with everything you need to succeed where it matter most: the classroom. This series will walk your students through the rules of grammar by explaining proper verb tense, nouns, phrases, participles, and more, as well as illustrate common errors such as dangling prepositions, run-on sentences, and faulty parallels.

Three versions of the Judgment of Solomon story illustrate the changes that have taken place in the English language across more than a millennium: from Aelfric’s 10th-century account of how Solomon’s wisdom reached to the truth, through Middle, to Early Modern and Modern English. At each stage, the grammar and vocabulary of the pieces are analyzed, as are the social assumptions of the writers. The Old and Middle English selections are read by scholars of the period. (20 minutes)

Languages evolve, just like societies, and this is the essence that this series aims to capture. It looks at the history of the English language and how as much as 80 percent of the vocabulary has been borrowed from other languages. Recently, there have been rapid changes due to SMS, emails, and social media.