Prompted by a suggestion made by Tim Halkowski (Wisconsin) Ruth Parry (Loughborough) and other colleagues, here’s a list of clips from TV shows and so on that might be used to help get across language-in-interaction concepts to students.
More recent suggestions nearer the top. More always welcome (send to me at c.antaki@Lboro.ac.uk).
Alexa Hepburn (Rutgers) :
Alexa has been updating her assignments “to make them more fun for all our stressed out students in my UG class. One will involve basically building off of Liz Stokoe’s ‘interactional breaches’ paper (we’ve had fun with breaching experiments and learned some basic CA skills so far). As part of it, I’ve transcribed a few of the Friends extracts (some I did a while back at Lbro), and also a long request sequence from the Schitt’s Creek sitcom”. The documents are here.
Simon Stewart (Southampton):
This clip from Friends features a nice pragmatic incongruity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n780KlqdEwE
The key sequence starts at 15 seconds and is a two turn exchange:
Simon writes: “it is a hilarious example of doing rejection in a way that highlights doing a dispreferred response, but then deviates from it by offering an unwillingness account instead of an inability account.”
- I use this Big Bang Theory clip for teaching Indirect Speech Acts: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhv1dOae9MU>
- Another Big Bang Theory clip: this is good for teaching a plethora of phenomena (action interpretation, ISAs, relevance, etc.):<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCc9nyxqR44&feature=youtu.be>
Cherishable moment:
- And here see 02:20 et seq. in this for prompting/asking telling questions vs. Requests for information <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEYiDfx9838&feature=youtu.be>
- And in a more scholarly vein, this is a pretty good intro to the different types of Gricean implicature: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD82l_bUhLc&feature=youtu.be>
Ruth Parry:
- The hedge sketch – for sequencinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FUZ6eUwG54
- Curb your Enthusiasm Chat and cut – for queueing behaviour and social norms, and of course Larry’s rudenesshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77bW1aMAkhs
- Green Wing Sue White and her completely deviant interactional practice (buzzer) for indicating dispreferrednesshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBM1x5DPBXA
- Medical students’ spoof on communication skills – overdone ‘open questioning’ and morehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13m6d95yJd8
More clips useful for teaching, suggested by Adam Brandt (Newcastle-upon-Tyne):
- Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm are absolute treasure troves of this kind of thing. The most famous example probably being the ‘close talker’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGVSIkEi3mM
- But there are fleeting moments any time Larry David and/or Jerry Seinfeld are on screen. I love this tiny example, from 5:30-5:35 (this is unscripted): http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/larry-david-larry-eats-a-pancake
- And there is also this, from Family Guy, which I like, on delayed recipiency and pursuing responses…: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNkp4QF3we8
One from Cade Bushnell (University of Tsukuba):
- Here’s a favorite from “Everybody Loves Raymond.” I’ve been using this to teach about pre-sequencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr0418Ozjt4
Another set of video clips useful for teaching language in interaction, this time from Edward Reynolds (University of New Hampshire):
- I use this one for participation frameworks/eye contact https://vimeo.com/85448261
- It’s not a video but the ‘hide your pain Harold’ meme works well for expression/smiling http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-the-pain-harold
- I use this one for second turn proof procedure, it’s also naturalistic. From 0:36 onward https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXGXxAnYDMc
- I use this one for emblematic v’s deictic gesture (it’s also good for Goffman) from the old faithful seinfeld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahLEaVzBMuQ
- And one of a plethora of possibilities from Borat for intersubjectivity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKcWtvEzdR8 (but ensure you stop it before the racism starts at about 3:40)
Jenny Mandelbaum offers these videos that she and colleagues use in teaching CA at Rutgers:
- The first part of this sketch from Monty Python about remedial help for having your sentences completed by others is great for introducing turn-taking, tcus, projectability, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_cRP6MhM8k
- Another Monty Python sketch, The Great Debate, is a nice way to introduce/discuss TCUs and speech exchange systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gULNoATVT1I
- This sketch from The Whitest Kids U’ Know, called The New Thing, leads to great discussions about sequence organization, conditional relevance and adjacency pairs (although some find it a little violent…) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpSeMIE361g
- This scene from Friends is useful for talking about apologies and what kinds of responses they might make relevant: (Minutes 1:36-2:45) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHTrX6milno
Jenny adds that YouTube has a free downloader, called YTD Video Downloader, available at http://download.cnet.com/YTD-Video-Downloader/3000-2071_4-10647340.html
My own favourites:
- Emily Hofstetter has two lively and highly accessible tutorials on her CA youtube channel: on repair and on response relevance.
- More comedy routines: this (rather ancient) one from the British comedy duo Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker (both now deceased), is useful for illustrating the power of Grice’s maxim of relevance.
Research on Language and Social Interaction - Blog 