Soap Opera or Sitcom: Which one is closer to natural conversation linguistically?
What is it about?
One of the many resources teachers and learners alike seek for authentic materials, particularly for spoken English, is TV shows or clips. However, the concept of authenticity is relative, and it is sometimes hard to determine how authentic materials are. This study uses a corpus-based analysis to assess to what extent a soap opera, compared to a sitcom, represent natural conversation on a set of linguistic features associated with the situational characteristics of conversation.
Why is it important?
The importance of this study is that it uses more objective tool (i.e., using a set of features that appear to be prominent in spoken text based on corpus analyses) than just teacher’s hunch! Guess what? The selected soap opera seems to be relatively closer to natural conversation linguistically (i.e., in terms of l). One might guess that sitcom seems more like a natural conversation, which is true, but this study shows that the selected sitcom over did it! There are higher frequencies of the common features in sitcom overall, which makes it less authentic, ironically!