IT AIN’T COME IN STRAIGHT LINES. TV SERIES DIALOGUE AND LGBT+ VOCABULARY IN THE ENGLISH FOR MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION CLASSROOM

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).