without much anxiety. In the experimental group, contextualized language instruction through cartoon series ‘The
Simpsons” was used whose grammatical and lexical content resembled the weekly plan demanded in the school
curriculum. “The Simpsons” was chosen because it is the longest-running cartoon on prime time television and
because pupils themselves mentioned it as one of the cartoons they love watching. Both researchers’ viewing of the
cartoon made sure that the cartoon’s content was acceptable for these students from a moral and pedagogical
perspective.
The experimental group watched one episode and made use of it each week during the allocated time for the
research. The design of the first week is shared here to give the reader a sense of the instructional features of the
application. Throughout the first week, the pupils first watched the episode ‘Lisa the Drama Queen’ for pleasure. In
this viewing, the aim was to expose them to the natural language use in a non-threatening setting. Following this
viewing, they spent three hours to get through the details of the episode which contained numerous references to
schooling, school subjects, and structures containing lexical uses including “to be good at/ not good at something,
my best friend is…, my favorite school subject is…, my favourite topic is…” and chunks such as “Excuse me!,
Attention, everyone!, Are you OK?, You’re scaring me!, I need you, What a mess!” which present authentic
language use by allowing the pupils to use these in ordinary language. The teacher used the strategy of “pausing and
replaying” by asking students questions related to the scene watched and she also used some PowerPoint
presentations including some images captured fro