Over the past decade, videos have become an integral part of our lives. Mostly, this is due to the creation of YouTube, which became a pivotal moment for the expansion of video accessibility and the new wave of their popularity.

Arguably, the best representatives of authentic videos are movies. Films as an element of culture are present in various spheres: from entertainment to education. Talking about the latter, features of movies may be analysed, discussed, and used in the teaching process not only at film schools or cinematic arts faculties but also for teaching English as a foreign language at technical universities. In fact, fragments of movies and other authentic video aids have proved to be effective in teaching English even to future engineers (Saienko & Shevchenko, 2020; Shevchenko, 2015; Shevchenko, 2018).

To properly implement feature films and/or clips from them in the curriculum, it is necessary to make a linguistic analysis of spoken discourse presented on the authentic videos in question.

It should be mentioned that authentic materials are the ones created for native speakers and not for pedagogical purposes (i.e. not for learners of the language). Film discourse, even being contrived in most of the cases, is very close to the attested everyday language (Gilmore, 2010; Sherman, 2003) and it provides foreign-language students with the nearest to the real life experience of spoken language and its features, serving as a ‘gateway’ to foreign cultural reality. This is, partially, because of actors’ frequent improvisations, interpretation of the script, and its negotiation during filming.

Movies are inherently somewhat similar to novels since they all tell a story. In terms of genres, the basic ones are also the same (drama, thriller, romance, etc.). However, feature films may have sub-genres invented to specify expectations of certain types of movies within each genre, e.g. disaster thriller, psychological thriller, romantic drama, legal drama, historical romance.

Taking into account the similarity between films and literature, the methods used to analyse a movie are closely related to those employed to analyse the written matter. Nevertheless, films are multimodal, that is, they present information via the dual-channel (visual and acoustic), which often influences the movie’s spoken discourse and facilitates perception and comprehension of speech through the simultaneous activation of two senses - vision and hearing. This fact makes movie discourse closer to real-life conversation than to written texts. Concurrently, the spoken discourse of films can be characterized as akin to one of the media (e.g. TV news). Thus, it is important to also analyse speech in films from a contextual discourse perspective because “the extended notion of discourse, when referring to a whole communicative event, may well also feature other (visual, gestural) dimensions of communication and interaction, sometimes closely intertwined with the verbal aspect, as is the case in spoken movies” (Van Dijk, 1998, p. 197).

The spoken discourse of authentic videos and media should be studied and described using techniques developed by discourse analysis, functional stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, critical linguistics, rhetorical criticism, and linguoculturology.

The most recurrent features of spoken discourse on authentic videos in English are provided further (Giampieri, 2018, p. 403-405). It should be noted that the majority of them are rarely found in formal written texts.

1. Formulaic expressions, or ‘formulemes’, which range from multiword units to discoursal routines, e.g. idioms, proverbs, conversational speech formulas, pause fillers, swearing. They are often used by native speakers and, when uttered by non-native speakers, they tend to increase their perceived proficiency. Examples of such expressions are: “Hi”, “Yeah”, “To cut a long story short”, “Get your act together"”, “He’s got his head in the clouds’”, etc.

1. Spoken discourse markers/fillers ("well", "you know”, “like”, "eh", ""uh-huh"", ""right", ""actually"", ""quite"", etc.). They have little lexical content and used to monitor, organize, and manage speech.
2. Vague category markers (VCM). They imply that there is no need to specify further and some pieces of information can be non-elaborated or omitted. VCM include expressions such as “or something (like that)", ""or whatever"", ""and so on"", ""and stuff (like that)".
3. Pragmatic meanings and conventions, e.g. metaphors ("heart of gold""), idioms ("Break a leg""), euphemisms ("topass away"" instead of ""to die"", ""resting in peace"" for ""deceased"), hyperbole ("your brain is the size of a pea""). A continually increasing awareness of the pragmatic conventions in the target language can eventually lead to near-native proficiency (Hwang, 2008).
4. Repetitions (of the same word or part of a phrase).
5. Self-corrections (reordering a phrase).
6. Contractions of various parts of speech ("ad" instead of ""advertisement"", ""pic"" instead of ""picture"", ""gimme"" instead of ""give me"", ""kinda"" instead of " kind of", " cos" instead of " because").
7. Ellipses, which include subject pronouns, articles, or auxiliaries.
8. False starts, which occur when sentences are ‘broken off to insert other speech material.

10. Deictic expressions are used to convey the speaker’s situational (visible) context with the help of personal pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, articles, tense, usually with the interpretation of utterances. For example: ""Have you bought the book?" (i.e. exactly the book the speaker has in mind).

At present, grammar plays a smaller role in the communication process than in writing, so less attention may be paid to it. However, while watching clips from movies or other authentic videos, like TV programmes, it is possible to find grammar instances and parse grammatical nuances, e.g. unfinished clauses, which are common.

Viewing authentic videos induces active participation and promotes the viewers’ implicit knowledge via three processes (Giampieri, 2018, p. 405): 1) noticing (becoming aware of a new linguistic feature existence); 2) comparing (viewers compare the new linguistic feature with their knowledge), 3) integrating (the new linguistic feature is integrated into the viewers’ expertise).

Summing up, watching movie clips and other authentic videos may help the viewers and the foreign language learners understand and retain real-life spoken language features (lexical, grammatical, stylistic, etc.), and, ultimately, achieve the near-native level of English language proficiency.

References

1. Hwang, C. C. (2008). Pragmatic conventions and intercultural competence. Linguistics Journal, 3(2),  31-48. Retrieved from https://www.linguistics-
2. iournal.com/2014/01/08/pragmatic-conventions-and-intercultural-competence/
3. Giampieri, P. (2018). Spoken language features (and anomalies) in films for ESL classes. De Gruyter, 8(2), 399-425. Doi:10.1515/cercles-2018-0022
4. Gilmore, A. (2010). Exploiting film discourse in the foreign language classroom. In F. Mishan & A. Chambers (Eds.), Perspectives on language learning materials development (pp. 110-148). Peter Lang Publishing.
5. Saienko, N., Shevchenko, M. (2020). Authentic videos in teaching English to engineering students at universities. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research, 19(8), 350-370. doi:10.26803/iilter.19.8.19
6. Shevchenko, M. V. (2015). The role of authentic videos in teaching English at technical universities. Advanced Education, 4, 66-70. doi:10.20535/2410-8286.57306 Shevchenko, M. (2018). Analysis of the influence of authentic English videos on technical students’ memorization and subsequent recall of the English lexis. Science and Education a New Dimension. Pedagogy and Psychology, VI(65), Issue: 155, 49­53. Retrieved from https://cutt.lv/cRHZSMS
7. Sherman, J. (2003). Using authentic video in the language classroom. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 275.
8. Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London, United Kingdom: Sage. 384.