Complexity Matters in TV Dialogue for Informal L2 English Learning: A Corpus-based Description

The spread of digital devices and new media has led to a proliferation of English-speaking audiovisual products and to a gradual shift in L2 English learning, increasingly occurring out of the classroom. In fact, the extensive informal contact with English audiovisual dialogue as part of L2 learner-users’ everyday leisure activities has been found to be potentially conducive to incidental learning and language acquisition (Sockett 2014; Kusyk 2020). This calls for a description of English-language media, major sources of language input L2 viewers are exposed to (Pavesi, Ghia 2020). The present study aims to investigate grammatical complexity in fictional TV dialogue, moving from the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (Bednarek 2018a). A register-functional approach (Biber 1988) is adopted in the quantitative and qualitative assessment of clausal and phrasal complexity features in TV series, with a focus on finite/non-finite subordinate clauses and noun phrase premodification. The data are first interpreted in relation to the diegetic and extradiegetic functions served by complexity features onscreen and then against previous corpus-based findings on the grammatical complexity of spontaneous face-to-face conversation (Biber 2005; Biber et al. 2021). The results show that TV dialogue closely approximates casual conversation for major patterns of phrasal and clausal complexity. Register-specific functions emerge associated with the audience-oriented narrative dimension of telecinematic products, the strive for realism and the expression of characters’ stance. Such referential and communicative functions increase the accessibility of TV narratives for L2 viewers, often in tandem with the visuals in a multimodal fashion. All in all, TV dialogue qualifies as a reliable and rich type of input for L2 learner-users, reproducing the complexity of conversational exchanges that learner-viewers can readily use as a model of spoken English.