Teaching Stylistic Variation through Film

Abstract

Excusez-moi, Madame, vous degagez?, said one student on a study abroad program to an elderly lady vacating a parking place... This type of stylistic blunder by a student eager to use a recently learned phrase will sound all too familiar to many of us. Stylistic errors can have consid erable consequences, resulting, minimally, in embarrassment or confu sion or, more seriously, in offending the addressee. As Halliday pointed out, The choice of items from the wrong register, and the mixing of items from different registers, are among the most frequent mistakes made by non-native speakers (NNS) of a (150). By the same token, while is clearly inappropriate to use speech that is too informal for a given setting, Ervin-Tripp notes that it would be equally incompe tent to use formal style in all situations to all addressees in a society allowing for a broader range of (268). In this article, we focus on helping intermediate and advanced learners to become aware of and eventually use spoken stylistic variation (SV) in French. We propose that using film excerpts may be an effective way to sensitize them to language variation according to different speakers and settings, variation that learners do not usually encounter in the sociolin guistically reduced universe of the classroom. We begin by defining SV and giving examples of in French. Then we discuss the use and selec tion of film excerpts to teach SV. Finally, we propose a pedagogical se quence using two scenes from the movie Une Fille seule directed by Benoit Jacquot.