SBS helping migrants navigate everyday life in Australia with the release of Learn English video series
SBS’s Learn English has released a new digital series designed to help people ease into learning the English language and understand more about Australian culture.
Titled Meet the Changs, the drama comedy series – consisting of ten, five-minute videos – follows the newly settled Chang family as they navigate daily life in Australia. The episodes cover various day-to-day situations including parent/teacher interviews, what to do in the event of a car crash, buying a new fridge and going to the doctor, and are intended to help the 820,000 Australians self-reported to have no or low English proficiency. The videos are designed for audiences with a pre-intermediate level of language proficiency to help them build on and develop their abilities.
SBS Director of Audio and Language Content, David Hua, says the expansion of SBS’s Settlement Guide offering with SBS Learn English will help migrant Australians to be successful in Australia.
“We are extremely excited to be launching the next part of our Learn English offering. SBS Learn English supports settlement and social cohesion through a distinctive and accessible approach to learning English and understanding everyday life in Australia.
“Meet the Changs is an educational and entertaining video series that speaks to our Charter and demonstrates the diversity of what we do at SBS. The series has been produced from a distinctly multicultural perspective; using diverse writers from migrant backgrounds with lived experience of learning English as an adult to help underpin the concept and scripts for authenticity and to offer the best value for audiences.”
All ten episodes are available now on the SBS Learn English website, SBS On Demand and SBS Australia’s YouTube page. Each episode also has an accompanying syllabus available for download with worksheets and tools to assist students and English language learning teachers. The video series is available with English captions and will soon offer subtitles in twelve languages to assist audiences with understanding and learning.
SBS Learn English is a free, multi-platform English language learning service for Australian migrants with additional in-language support. SBS Learn English helps adult migrants to settle and live well in Australia by assisting them to learn the English language through settlement information, news and everyday life from a distinctly Australian multicultural perspective.
In addition to the videos, the SBS Learn English podcast provides regular lessons in conversational English on everyday life in Australia. The podcast helps to breakdown common phrases and local lingo. To provide context and maximise accessibility, the podcast title and episode description, as well as a recorded introduction, is available in a number of languages with fortnightly episodes being published in Arabic, Assyrian, Burmese, Cantonese, Dari, Hakha Chin, Karen, Khmer, Korean, Mandarin, Mongolian, Persian, Thai and Vietnamese.
Since its launch, the Learn English podcast has had over 116,000 downloads. SBS’s Learn English podcast is available via the SBS Radio App, SBS website and all major podcast platforms
Watch the promo for Meet the Changs here.
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For a PDF version of this media release, click here.