The Relationship Between Salience and Culture in Movie English

The purpose of this paper is to find out whether a relationship between salience and culture exists in movies. Since memorization of the utterances is one of the primary goals in movie English classrooms, it is worth researching a relationship between the two concepts. The romantic comedy Some Kind of Beautiful (Vaughan, 2014) was used in this paper. The movie shows many cultural differences from which seven scenes were selected. Cultural notes were added for each scene. These cultural notes were used to promote constructed salience, which occurs when an EFL teacher creates a context using cultural information. The results show that cultural notes function as a context and shed light on expressions that initially appeared to be insignificant to L2 learners in terms of language learning. Such expressions play an important role in understanding each scene and help students get the most out of the movie. Constructed salience directs attention to non-salient expressions; that is, it changes non-salient expressions into salient ones. Constructed salience in a movie deals with both content matters and the linguistic matters in question. As long as the content remains in L2 learners’ memory, the related linguistic forms will remain salient as well.