A Suggestion About the Use of Salience in Learning Multiword Expressions Through an Animated Movie

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to review the literature concerning the notion of salience and 2) to demonstrate how to guide EFL students in Korea to pay attention to multiword expressions (MWEs). This paper is based on Spada and Lightbown’s (2008) integrated form-focused instruction (FFI) in which student attention is attracted to MWEs during communicative activities. The definition of salience and its aspects and dimensions were reviewed as simply and easily as possible. Since the notion of salience will be used educationally, a complex and difficult review was avoided. The American computer-animated romantic comedy Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (Tartakovsky, 2018) was chosen to show how salience and attention effectively interplay. This animation is perfect to observe the function of salience. Visual and acoustic characteristics are typical features to detect perceptional salience. Characters’ utterances are superior in detecting semantic-pragmatic salience. In addition to these, bottom-up salience and top-down salience were introduced. Ten scenes were cut in the animation to demonstrate how salience constrains and directs attention to MWEs. When teachers use this demonstration in the classroom, they do not have to emphasize concepts such as perceptual salience or sematic salience; the teacher helps to direct their students’ attention to MWEs.