Teaching compliments and insults in the EFL class through film clips

The purpose of this contribution is to endorse the use of film clips to teach aspects of interactional dynamics and to foster multimodal awareness in the foreign language classroom. After establishing the feasibility of using film dialogue as a model for face-to-face conversation, I will consider the case of some conversational routines, namely complimenting and insulting. In particular, I will suggest ways of exploiting some film material by means of a multimodal transcription that integrates linguistic analysis with information encoded in nonlinguistic channels (e.g., the technical aspects related to framing and editing and the nonverbal signals of communication expressed through kinesics and proxemics). In the latter part, I will suggest different audio and video combinations in order to draw attention to the multimodal dimension of meaning making, highlighting both linguistic and cultural aspects of the two conversational routines under investigation