This chapter aims to redress this imbalance to some extent by describing a method for ‘freezing’ and then exploiting film discourse1 in the classroom. Given its central role in shaping our social identities, it i s surprising that spoken discourse has not been the focus of more attention in language learning materials. In fact, casual conversation is concerned with the joint construction of social reality’. The fields of conversational and discourse analysis emerged from these technological advances, and led to the understanding we have today of the fundamental importance of spoken discourse, particularly casual conversation, in our lives: ‘ casual conversation is a critical linguistic site for the negotiation of such important dimensions of our social identity as gender, generational location, sexuality, social class membership, ethnicity, and subcultural and group affiliations. The invention of the tape recorder in the 1930s allowed researchers to begin transcribing and analyzing natural speech and was, according to Halliday (1994, p.xxiii), perhaps ‘the greatest single event in the history of linguistics’. (Mountcalm Carr and Dadley-Potter 1912, cited in Taborn 1983, p.208) Shop-girl (pointing to a display of Easter eggs on the counter): In chocolate or marchpane? How do you like these? Mrs Brooke (to her companion): They are too large, aren’t they? (She looks round.) Why, here are some at sixpence they will do splendidly. Enter Mrs Brooke and Miss Elsing.) Shop-girl (approaching): Are you being attended to, ladies? Mrs Brooke: No, not yet. It is the Saturday before Easter and the shop, in consequence, is fairly crowded with customers. (Scene: a well-known French confectioner’s shop in New Oxford St. Early attempts to represent spoken English to learners were often inspired i nspired more by literary sources than authentic conversation, as this extract from an early twentieth-century phrase book for German tourists illustrates: This can be seen as a natural consequence consequence of the fact that, not only has the written medium always been easier to capture, display and analyze than the spoken one, it has also tended to be considered more prestigious, historically (Brown and Yule 1983 Carter and McCarthy 2006). Traditionally, the teaching of English as a Second or Other Language has been based on written models of the language, more often than not focusing on sentence-based sentence-based grammatical descriptions, or on vocabulary arising in the target texts. ‘The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.’ (Anatole France 1844-1924) Please reference the original source in any citations. ![]() ![]() Chambers (Eds.) (2010), Perspectives Perspectives on Language Learning Materia ls Development Developm ent . Note: This is a draft version of a book chapter originally published in F. Catching words: Exploiting film discourse in the foreign language classroom Alex Gilmore, University of Tokyo, Japan Email:
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