IT AIN’T COME IN STRAIGHT LINES. TV SERIES DIALOGUE AND LGBT+ VOCABULARY IN THE ENGLISH FOR MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION CLASSROOM
Author(s)
Date Issued
2022
Type
article
Volume
vol. 19
Start Page
1
End Page
16
Journal
Abstract
The main aim of this contribution is to demonstrate the innovative pedagogical use of TV dialogues in the teaching of English for Media and Communication from a gender-b(i)ased perspective.
Education through entertainment is very different from formal education offered by schools
and academic institutions and the use of entertainment modes helps create innovative content
and practices (McKee 2016). In this contribution the concept of eudaimonic entertainment is
key to understanding the pedagogical function of TV, on the one hand (e.g. Roth et al. 2014),
and, on the other, to challenging the idea that television as a domestic medium is associated
with heteronormativity (Davis and Needham 2008; Parsemain 2019).
Television is one of the “agents of communication” (Lippi-Green 2012) and recent studies on TV
dialogue demonstrate that it is an important source of information about language and society
(Bednarek 2018; Coupland 2007). When consumed in the original version, TV dialogue, not
television as media production as a whole, represents “a key way in which learners encounter
English-language conversations, and it may constitute an influential model” (Mittmann 2006:
575).
