Making a difference? Public service broadcasting, distinctiveness and children’s provision in Italy and Spain

This article evaluates the performance of public service broadcasters in the area of children’s television in Italy and Spain. It asks: how distinctive is the output of public service children’s channels? As core area of public service provision, children’s television represents an important testing ground for wider debates about the distinctiveness of public service broadcasting in a digital age. Public broadcasters in Southern Europe have historically been more vulnerable to market pressure than their counterparts in continental and Northern Europe, and this is believed to have impacted negatively on their ability to maintain a distinctive public service profile. After engaging with debates on distinctiveness in order to develop a framework for the analysis, the article presents the results of a two-week analysis of the TV schedules of the main children’s channels operating in the two countries. It finds evidence that in both countries the output of public service children’s channels is distinctive to a degree, but also that there are important gaps in public service provision as well as some significant differences between the public service children’s channels analysed.

Language Teaching Methodologies, Intercultural Awareness and Autonomous Learning

This paper will examine familiar reasons for including the teaching of intercultural competence within Language Teaching before adding some less familiar ones. It will focus in particular on the question of how far intercultural competence can be learned when students are formally studying languages and how far such competence needs to be acquired autono-mously. It will though also ask to what extent being initiated to the very varied facets of in-tercultural competence during formal language study plays an important role in allowing ef-fective autonomous acquisition to take place. The paper will conclude that a significant part of the intercultural development that students need to undertake if they are to be able to communicate effectively in a foreign language must happen autonomously, but that it is, nonetheless, vital that language courses at least sow the seeds of intercultural learning in ways that will facilitate autonomous learning. As such, language courses, if they are genuinely to meet student needs, should incorporate elements of intercultural training. The paper also concludes by outlining the type of empirical research that would need to be carried out for these claims to be fully substantiated.

Identification of enterprise carbon assets based on a business perspective

From a new perspective, this paper clarifies the internal and external factors affecting the carbon assets on the basis of induction of the connotation. It takes the enterprise business as the source of carbon assets, and makes an automotive group as an example, and establishes a network of its passenger car business activities based on the topological structure. This paper provides a method for identifying carbon assets from the relationship of business activities, and explains the formation mechanism of different assets from which it refines its network, and puts forward a reference to re-identify enterprise carbon assets from the perspective of development.