Analysing the speech act of refusing in Grey’s anatomy series

Abstract

Appropriate refusal interactions may be a difficult task for learners of English in a foreign context since they tend to apply rules from their native language to the target language when refusing. Consequently, they can be considered rude and impolite in some situations. For that reason, more and more scholars have focused their studies on the importance of teaching pragmatics in the FL classroom, concluding that it is all-important to foster their pragmatic competence. In addition, recent studies have shown that video materials such as TV series, news broadcast or films provide students with authentic pragmatic input, plenty of instances of refusing situations in real settings. On the contrary, some researchers have questioned the validity of these situations considering that the language used in video materials is not real but ‘ficticious’ since it has been written in advance. Bearing in mind the results obtained by FernándezGuerra in her 2008 and 2013 studies in which the benefits of using TV series to teach the speech act of refusing are proved, the present paper analyses the occurrences of all refusal situations appearing on three episodes from the first season of Grey’s Anatomy series, to determine whether this series can be considered a useful input source in the FL classroom.