A study by the USA's Northwestern University provides biological evidence that people who are bilingual have a more powerful brain. Drs Viorica Marian and Nina Kraus investigated how bilingualism affects the brain. They found that studying another language "fine-tunes" people's attention span and enhances their memory. In particular they discovered that when language learners attempt to understand speech in another language, it activates and energises the brainstem – an ancient part of the brain. Professor Kraus stated: "Bilingualism serves as enrichment for the brain and has real consequences when it comes to…attention and working memory." Professor Marian explained why studying and learning another language was so beneficial for the brain. She said: "People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp, but the advantages we've discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages." She added: "It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound." She said bilinguals were better listeners because they are "natural jugglers" of sound. She said: "The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds."

If you are a movie fan and you like studying English, you might just be interested in the latest initiative of the Hollywood movie studio Warner Brothers. The company has released a series of screenplays of its classic movies as eBooks. The scripts are full of images, diagrams and facts in addition to the conversations and dialogues from the films. Now English students can read up on the movie and read along while they watch it. The digital scripts also give English teachers a valuable new tool to use in the classroom. Many students like to learn English via movies. The eBooks are currently on sale on Amazon.com at around $8. The books can be downloaded on Apple's iBookstore and are available for the Nook eBook reader.

So far only a small selection of movie scripts has been released. These include An American in Paris, Ben Hur, Casablanca and North by Northwest. President of Warner Brothers digital distribution Thomas Gewecke explained why he thinks the new products will prove popular: "People love movies because of the stories they tell," he said. "Now we can give fans rarely seen details of how these stories came together and take their enjoyment of films to a whole new level," he added. Mr Gewecke said the eBooks are just for classic movies at the moment but that books for newer movies will be released in the future. It will be some time however before the eBook coincides with the movie release.