How to Enhance Language Awareness of Beginners Using the American TV Comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to examine whether beginning level students improve language awareness through language play and (2) to investigate whether they can receptively find language play in movie discourse. For this, two beginning level college students joined in a case study. The media material was episode 1 from season 1 of the 2013 American comedy television series, Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Lord & Miller, 2013). In this study, three stages were administered. In the first stage, the participants chose whatever they preferred in the drama without any instruction. In the second stage, they were instructed briefly through discourse analysis. In the third stage, the teacher gave discourse analysis-oriented instruction in which the participants learned pragmatic and contextual meaning, and they matched those meanings with linguistic expressions. The results indicated that the participants showed only small improvements in awareness of linguistic items in the first stage. During the second stage, after they were instructed about language play, their discovery of linguistic items showed a small increase. Lastly, in the third stage, the results revealed learners became stronger in explaining sequences of linguistic items even though grammatical meanings were mentioned only once. Meaning in this case study turned out to be essential.