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You might expect anyone who learns their English from watching BBC One's EastEnders to pepper every other sentence with shouts of "Get outta my pub!", "You ain't my mother!" and the collected musings on life of that great sage, Dot Cotton.
But picking up English from the soap was about more than a string of one-liners for Farid Saleh when he arrived in the UK from Afghanistan as a child refugee. It was a route to a new life.
Farid's father had been killed in political violence and, as the oldest son, the 13-year-old was in danger. His family paid for him to get to the UK, where the scared and bewildered teenager was placed with a foster family.
"When I met my foster family it was challenging, I didn't know what they were saying," he says. "There would be days I would come home from school and say, 'I can't do this.'"
So every night his foster mother would sit with him and they'd watch EastEnders together with the subtitles on.
They would note new words and Farid would try to use them in sentences.
Slowly and steadily he stopped being a teenager lost in a foreign world and grew into a young man with a future.
You don't need to take my word for it. Farid speaks for himself in our film, although I should perhaps apologise for twisting his arm into saying the legendary "Get outta my pub!" line.
"EastEnders helped me to know what people were talking about at school," he says. "I was able to be part of that conversation."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-41516251
But picking up English from the soap was about more than a string of one-liners for Farid Saleh when he arrived in the UK from Afghanistan as a child refugee. It was a route to a new life.
Farid's father had been killed in political violence and, as the oldest son, the 13-year-old was in danger. His family paid for him to get to the UK, where the scared and bewildered teenager was placed with a foster family.
"When I met my foster family it was challenging, I didn't know what they were saying," he says. "There would be days I would come home from school and say, 'I can't do this.'"
So every night his foster mother would sit with him and they'd watch EastEnders together with the subtitles on.
They would note new words and Farid would try to use them in sentences.
Slowly and steadily he stopped being a teenager lost in a foreign world and grew into a young man with a future.
You don't need to take my word for it. Farid speaks for himself in our film, although I should perhaps apologise for twisting his arm into saying the legendary "Get outta my pub!" line.
"EastEnders helped me to know what people were talking about at school," he says. "I was able to be part of that conversation."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-41516251
