The Oprah Winfrey show

Today’s session of the Gabfest Club (Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) was dedicated to the topic “TV Talk Shows”. To introduce the terms and definitions for the topic we have read and translated an article about the genre of tabloid talk shows and their specific features. The article introduced two well - known Americans talk show hosts – Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. To translate an unknown idiom in the article we used the WOA’s Dictionary of American idioms.

To illustrate the topic we watched the YouTube video of Phil Donahue’s Show with American and Soviet audience. The fact that O. Winfrey was awarded the US Medal of Freedom and her speech in a video impressed the group a lot.

The second part of the session was dedicated to the conversation about classification of talk shows on Ukrainian TV. The Club members were asked to tell about their favorite talk shows and hosts. It turned out that half of the people present at the session do not watch TV and use the time to read, to study, to visit friends and do things about the house and garden. Among the favorite Ukrainian talk shows prevailed the ones hosted by females. It turned out that political shows these days scare our club members and they tend to avoid them.

At the end of the session several arrangements were made for an important session that will require a lot of language preparation from the Club members.

The session was educational as it introduced new vocabulary and triggered meaningful conversation (18 persons).