| TV shows, especially soap operas and sitcoms, are usually considered by ESL practitioners as a source of authentic spoken conversational materials presumably because they reflect the linguistic features of natural conversation. However, practitioners might be faced with the dilemma of how to evaluate whether such conversational materials reflect the linguistic characteristics of natural ones. Previous classifications were based on practitioners' personal impressions and intuitions. The study shows that this somewhat subjective approach is problematic and adopts a corpus-based lexico-grammatical approach to investigate the extent to which soap opera, compared to sitcom, reflects the linguistic representation of natural conversation. To reach this goal, the study conducts a multidimensional analysis following Biber's (1988) model and a frequency-based lexico-grammatical functional analysis based on a group of salient lexico-grammatical features (Quaglio, 2004, 2009).;Results of the multidimensional analysis indicate that sitcom is relatively closer to natural conversation than soap opera. The frequency-based lexico-grammatical analysis, on the other hand, suggests that soap opera might represent natural conversation more than sitcom. Implications to ESL practitioners are discussed. |
