Telenovelas can actually have educational value. I used a Spanish soap opera (Corazon Salvaje) to teach my advanced high school Spanish class. Believe me, it was much easier to keep the student's attention with that soap opera! (If you would like more specific information on how I used the novela in the class room please e-mail me.) Obviously, the most important thing to be learned from a soap opera is the Spanish language itself. Too often, students of Spanish don't get to hear the language used in every day situations. Novelas let the students hear a variety of speakers with different voices, accents, and ways of expressing themselves in normal discussions. As we watched the novela, often the students would say that a certain character was hard to understand. That lead to a good discussion as we tried to pinpoint why that particular person was hard to understand. Another thing that I noticed as time passed was how much easier it was for the students to understand the Spanish without translating every word and repeating the scene five times! At first, it was very slow. We would go over every scene several times so the students could pick up more words. By the end, we could watch a scene only once or twice and the students would understand the majority of the scene! It was great to see the advances in just a short time!
Another thing that students can learn from a soap opera is culture. Besides learning popular sayings, idioms, and new meanings of familiar words, the students began to get an understanding of what life was like in another part of the world. One of the great lessons that my students learned was to distinguish between tu and Usted. They matched up the relationships and began to understand which form of you was acceptable! Also, viewers are subtly exposed to every day customs such as meals, courting, school, work, and much more.
If you are trying to learn Spanish, I would highly suggest trying to watch telenovelas. They can teach you much more than you can find in a textbook!
Resources
"http://www.rinconlatino.com/" - Telenovelas Internet is one of the best soap opera guides available. It has archives for many past novelas and most of the current ones. Most importantly, they include a messsage board for each soap opera currently on. There is a daily summary and discussions on topics related to the novela. It is written mostly in English so it is a perfect reference for Spanish students!
