The teaching applicability of movies and the strength of Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA)

This paper firstly examines the traditional linguistic status of movie language, as considered in the literature. Movie language has been seen to be pre-fabricated speech, which is artificial, and of limited value, not being representative of language. Such a view, however, is shown in the paper to be impressionistic, rather than empirically based. It is recounted how the compilation of a corpus of transcriptions of movies, as opposed to scripts, and its examination via Biber’s Multi-Dimensional Analysis techniques, reveal that the language of movies is actually so similar, in the majority of its features, to spontaneous conversation, as to be, on the contrary, extremely representative of speech, and therefore worthy of consideration when studying spoken discourse. This scientific “defense” of the status of movie language overturns the view of movie language that has been held of over thirty years, and provides solid reasons for using movies in the classroom to teach features of spoken discourse.