A discourse analysis of conversations in American TV dramas

Ryu, Do Hyung

Article

Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2011;12(1):149-176.
Published online June 30, 2011.

A discourse analysis of conversations in American TV dramas

Do Hyung Ryu

미국 드라마 대화 담화 분석 연구

유도형

Abstract

It's time to offer a theoretical basis for the popularity as well as look at the value of using American TV dramas for the teaching and learning of English. The purpose of this study is to examine how ESL students have preconceived ideas about this as well as to assess the current situation of learning English through American TV dramas. It will also study the features and advantages of conversations in American TV dramas through conversational analysis. A questionnaire was given to 122 students and thirty episodes of TV dramas were randomly chosen then analyzed through quantitative and qualitative methods of discourse analysis. This study shows that students prefer to watch comedy sitcoms and contemporary soap operas for learning English. The results also show that regardless of the genre of the drama, there are similar amounts of conversational routines, culture-based vocabulary, words of expertise, slang/swearing, and everyday expressions. It was also found that there are two main features in TV drama dialogues: (1) they assume a lot of prior historical and cultural background knowledge, and (2) their coherence is focused on the second speaker in dialogue pairs.

Key Words: American TV dramas(soap operas);conversation analysis;coherence of film dialogues;features of film dialogues